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Managing 871W with a GUI

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Having become frustrated with the lack of flexibility of 'home' routers for my Virgin Cable link, I decided to get a 'proper' router and so bought an old Cisco 871W.

At first look it seemed to fit the bill - vastly configurable but a novice web based interface to manage it initially.

However, because the web software relies on old browsers, but more particularly wants to run in a local JRE on the PC which is much earlier than the current Java release, it doesn't seem to be manageable by anything more recent than a specially configured version of XP with out of date Java.

This, of course, causes certain problems within a SOHO environment where XP is now out of support (with loads of nagging from Microsoft) and general security principles suggest that you shouldn't even have Java installed on your PC, let alone an outdated version.

Also, I am told that reverting Java versions is not an easy thing.

So has anyone tackled this issue successfully?

One option that occurred was to find a Linux distribution which was happy to run old versions of Java and could easily roll back between versions.

Another was a (free) Cisco router [IOS] management tool which didn't rely on a JRE on the PC.

I can do the whole thing in CLI (eventually) but this gives me a very steep learning curve.

Cheers

LGC

Reply to
David.WE.Roberts
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I'm afraid I'd do it this way, at least for a simple home install.

(In fact, I'm not sure I've ever configured any Cisco kit any other way!)

And no, I'm not a CC{whatever}. I've just picked it up as I've gone along.

Reply to
Huge

Run XP in a VM, giving it network access to your router and nothing else?

VM snapshots are your friend.

Theo

Reply to
Theo Markettos

man java

and take note of this option:

-version:release

This may solve your problem. To a first approximation Java is backward compatible when it comes to running old .class/.jar files on a current JVM. Of course, if the application uses native code and so is not compiled into Java bytecode and nothing but Java bytecode then all bets are off.

Reply to
Martin Gregorie

That won't help much in this case, the cisco "GUI" code is notoriously poor, especially with reguard to varying versions of Java. You have to find the one magic ancient version of java that works with their code.

Although to the OP, the GUI isn't worth running anyway, and everybody had these java version issues even when the product was new. Cisco's are programmed in the CLI...

Reply to
Doug McIntyre

The CLI is the only way worth using/learning - imagine if all you knew was SDM, you'd be stuffed as soon as Cisco abandon it.

IME SDM isn't worth the bother of running. You'll find odd things happen that you weren't expecting and if you track the config with the likes of RANCID, you will see that bits of unrelated config get touched when you make changes.

IMO if you want a 'proper' router for home use, try a Mikrotik. You may find that an 871W struggles to deliver the full throughput you can expect with 'modern' broadband.

Reply to
alexd

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