1811 questions

We are considering purchasing an 1811. I have two questions that I haven't been able to answer from the documentation, if one of the experts monitoring this newsgroup know the answers, I'd appreciate it.

First, The 1811 has two WAN ports. The marketing collateral describes load sharing and failover as the purposes for the WAN ports - can both WAN ports be active simultaneously, particularly if we have each WAN port connected to its own dedicated static IP DSL modem/bridge? Will the router ensure a given connection-oriented stream always use the same WAN port? Particularly if we're having the 1811 NAT the outbound traffic?

Or can the redundant WAN ports be only used for failover if one fails?

Second, the 1811 has an 8-port switch. From the documentation, it appears that the ports can be assigned IP addresses. If I turn on ip routing in the

1811, can I connect different subnets to appropriately configured switch ports and have the 1811 do the layer 3 routing between the subnets (while routing everything else out the WAN ports)?

Thanks,

scott

Reply to
Scott Lurndal
Loading thread data ...

Two Ethernet ports, which: yes can be both active.

Always interesting. Load balancing is done on a session base, so a connection-oriented stream will go out of one port (if you do load-balancing) But suppose you're PC has address A, you browse to a host with address B. On the webpage of B is a link to a host C. The 1811 might decide to send A->B over port 0 and A->C over port 1, for the router sees this as two independent streams. Normally no one will notice, but if this is any kind of transaction for which hosts B and C together try to keep state, you might get problems. Such has nothing to do with Cisco routers, it is normal IP load-balancing behaviour.

Switch can be split in VLANs which might have a IP address on the router and then: YES the router will do inter-vlan routing, but.....!!!!! With only the performance of a 1811 CPU, which is much less than 100 Mbps! If it is for only occasionally situations, that might be enough. If you really want large amounts of VLAN to VLAN traffic, I suggest you use a Catalyst3560 or 3750 for that.

Reply to
Fred Rabouw

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.