Service Delivery in bandwidth poor locations

Being in the country presents some interesting challenges and one I find that I come up against frequently at the moment is, as the title suggests, getting needed services into various remote sites. Although ADSL is quite widespread, and where not available various wireless services (NextG and the like) are able to cover the connectivity issues. But in the case where one is attempting to link sites via a VPN, 512/512Kbps is really not enough for modern applications, particularly if you're pushing internet as well as mail and remote desktop connections over that particular link. Even an ADSL2+ link with speeds up to 24Mbps/1Mbps is not really adequate for the task at hand.

So how to get around this? I'm thinking along the lines of a division of service, decentralising where possible and using cloud technologies to take the burden off the VPN links, that is, push email out to the cloud and whatever other services available out to the internet, thereby reducing the outgoing bandwidth requirements at the central site. Hopefully this will free up more bandwidth for RDP and the like. Additional ADSL services can further reduce the burden if I push http traffic out that way (using a Netgear dual WAN router or the like).

I have recently had to put this theory into practice and it seems to be working out, but it's not entirely solving the problems. Perhaps a packet caching device at either end, such as the ones produced by Riverbed, might be the answer. It's a difficult question and it gets worse when people want to put voice over it as well. You can use clever calling plans to get cheap inter-office calls more easily than implementing a whole other VPN simply for voice. And at the end of the day, let's not forget that ADSL is provided in a "best effort" scenario and no provider in the country guarantees bandwidth availability.

Tricky tricky tricky....

Netgear DG834 woes

For quite some time I've used the Netgear DG834 as my router of choice, particularly as a low end router providing easy site-to-site VPN's. These little white routers will support up to 5 VPN tunnels and have proven themselves to be quite reliable under most circumstances.

Unfortunately, I think I've discovered the circumstances that these routers do not work well under. I have two sites under my management that have had no end of trouble with these routers. Here is the situation and the symptoms:

• both sites are ADSL2
• both sites have a single VPN connection to them as the responder
• both sites have appropriate ADSL2+ capable filters and short cables etc
• both sites drop their ADSL connection (not line sync) after 13 to 16 days and then fail to reconnect.
• A restart of the device (soft or hard) and the connection will stay up for anywhere between 5 and 16 minutes - whatever the time length is, it will always die after that time e.g. if it's 10 minutes, then it will lose connection every 10 minutes.
• both lines have been tested (and charged to the end user) by the carrier and the wholesaler and no line problems have been found. There are some very mild anomalies but nothing that should cause these sorts of issues
• both routers have the latest firmware, have been reset to default and still show the same errors.

Netgear have shown no willingness to engage with me on this issue. After calling them four times and speaking with four different 1st level techs I can't get them to acknowledge that the routers might have a problem. Mind you, it's only 2 routers out of 40+ that I have in place out in the real world. Replacing the routers with devices running different hardware results in a stable connection again so it's not the lines! Once everything has been eliminated as points of failure, the final location of the problem is the Netgear Router. So I've had to replace them and that's the subject of my next entry.