Cisco 861W opinions?

I'd probably go for the CISCO881W-GN-A-K9 over the 861, just a bit more, but a touch newer.

Not having used these specific 800 series, but older 800 series routers, I've found them to be solid little CPE boxes.

Rereading what I wrote below, its sounds more negative than it is. I guess I'm more critical of what they do than others may be, even though I really like Cisco, and have been using them for quite some time..

One thing you have to remember, is that the Cisco is first and foremost configured via CLI. Sure, Cisco provides a GUI configure interface, and over the years it has got to the point where it may be somewhat useful instead of total crap, but keep in mind, that in all cases, the config is a command-line, with a GUI bolted ontop of it.

Sometimes there gets to be some little point that the GUI can't configure, but is easily done in two lines in the CLI or some such like that. Or the GUI gets stuck on something and can't parse it.

Sometimes too, the hardware gets a little odd. I believe the 861W has the access-point be a separate device bolted onto the router chassis. Thus configuration is totally separate and not one integrated device. The GUI may show you some unified config, but underneath, its like you have a router box here, and an access point there, and if some oddness comes up, you may have to go into two devices in one, and deal with each bit on each of the physical devices to troubleshoot.

Otherwise, Cisco can stay up for years generally without fail. They'll support any feature you've ever looked for (well, the 800 series may have some restrictions on that front), moreso than other vendors which build you a box that does x, and only x. You'll find with Cisco, there'll be times where there's too many ways of doing different solutions, but its certainly nice to have that flexibility in order to implement new and different scenarios that other vendors would never have imagined.

If you want to get into more Ciscos, even the small boxes like this one would give you a good experience to more of their technology, as it really does get recycled across the whole line.

Thanks for the reply, Doug. I'm not too worried about the Cisco command-line interface. Although I've never worked with a Cisco product before, I am relatively well versed in CLIs, and often times prefer them to GUIs.

I looked into the 881 series as well but the availability seems to be much poorer. There are numerous places with the 861W listed as in stock, but almost every place that has an 881 series lists it as either 'out of stock', 'unavailable', or 'call'. This makes me wonder if something weird isn't happening with the product line, such as impending discontinuation of some of the models. 851 and 871 went end- of-life in January 2010; as I understood the 861 and 881 are supposed to be the replacement models. That's why I'm a bit surprised in the poor availability of the 881.

I read the same thing about the 861W having the access point and the router as somewhat loosely coupled devices in the same box. I should point out that I'm not opposed to outright getting separate boxes for access point and router if anyone has a suggestion for a good cisco access point. My key goal is to get some reliable hardware that I don't have to be worried about unexpected outages.

Scott

I had assumed, and still do not know either way, that the 860/880 relationship was similar to the 850/870.

850 Cheaper Slower CPU - possible limitation on data rate than can be supported Only one VLAN No "Advanced IP services" software - only needed for very exotic stuff or more than one VLAN. 870 More expensive Faster CPU - higher forwarding speed Up to four VLANS - needs more expensive software "Advanced IP services"

I am not really familiar with the 860/880.

Here are the forwarding seeds (fast switching - which is what you get in most cases).

850 10,000 pps 5 Mbps (bits per second) 870 25,000 pps 12 Mbps 860 10,000 pps 12 Mbps 880 50,000 pps 25 Mbps 890 100,000 pps 51 Mbps

NOTE:- these speeds assume the worst case of 64 byte packets. Average packet size in most cases is much more than this and throughput correspondingly higher. assuming 250 bytes is still going to be quite conservative unless you are doing something odd or perhaps VoIP where small packets are used.

These speeds do not apply to traffic switched within the integral 4 port (or whatever) ethernet switch. I imagine that will be wire rate on all ports.

So the 860 will be good for say 50Mbps internet access unless as mentioned small packets are in use.

Figures from:-

Hmmm that's a "partners" link. Don't think I am logged on right now but the ways of the Firefox they can be quite mysterious. Document may be available otherwise. Google for [router packets per second 3725 3845] seems to help. That's how I found it.

Sorry I meant to mention.

860 and 880 will I think have the same life expectancy. The lack of availability of 880 is likely due to the 860 being cheaper and and at the same time more than man enough for the job of a broadband SOHO router.

They probably don't sell enough to bother stocking them.

Okay, so the beast arrived on Wednesday. My first impressions were good - unboxing it shows it to be heavy, sturdy-looking, ... big ..., it appears to be of quality physical construction. Unfortunately, it's gone downhill ever since I started trying to configure it.

The CP and CP Express software seem to be extremely poor quality. I'd read warnings about this ahead of time, but usually I suspect those sorts of warnings come from novice users unfamiliar with networking... I've had numerous problems with the GUI software. 'CP Express' insists on running a wizard each time I try to use it, but appears to fail to save the settings at the end of the wizard, leading CP Express to insist on running the wizard again next time I use it.

The 'CP' tool would load up and display a blank windows explorer page and sit there with the progress bar moving for hours, but not actually doing anything. I eventually determined by googling around for similar problems that it was lacking 'Adobe Flash'. The CP software requires flash and java, and the failure mode of not having flash installed is to sit there and do nothing. Note to Cisco: an error message would be handy.

Fortunately, when I finally did get CP to work and write some settings to permanent storage, it cleared up the wizard problem with CP Express, so I can at least get CP Express to launch and view the settings.

Unfortunately, neither program seems to be capable of setting the router's IP address. Well that's not entirely true.... They'll both change the router's IP address, and the router responds to pings at the new address, but the router does not respond to telnet or web connections. It's effectively bricked until I power cycle it. I suppose I could try to get into it via the serial console and see what's going on inside the box.

Can anyone confirm for me -- do the internal telnet and web servers need to be restarted after changing the IP address?

I had hoped to at least get a basic workable configuration using the GUI tools that I could then tweak over the command line. The GUI tools just don't seem to be functional enough to do this. I wonder why Cisco includes these tools with the router if they're not capable of performing even the simplest and most common configuration changes that need to be done to a router.

Scott

Silly configuration professional software.... It changed the IP address without updating the access control list....

Well, that's one problem solved.

Fortunately, the CLI seems to be relatively easy to learn.

Note, from my original post to you.. :)

Guess they haven't improved on it much...

Just to confirm this point, but you've seemed to have figured it out already, no they don't. They'll update and be usable on the new IPs right away.

I should have listened!

It's hard to get across the point of just how bad these tools are though... I expected a certain amount of limitation in what they could configure, but I'm still astonished that the tools outright don't work at doing even the most basic things.

Yep, I seem to have the router and AP configured properly now. The key was giving up on the GUI tools entirely and doing everything from the CLI! :)

The GUI for the internal access point surprisingly isn't that bad. If only they'd take the developer who wrote the AP GUI and reassign him to writing a replacement for CP/CPExpress.

Scott

I have used the cli for say 15 years and I think it is one of the best pieces of computer science I have ever seen. Really, really nice for the time.

Things though have moved on in the world and as evidenced by for example Checkpoint Firewall1, no matter how complex the configuration is, a GUI is up to the job. Only perhaps once or twice in nearly 10 years have I had to revert to non-gui checkpoint configuration. And then of course they give you a gui to do the low level editing too:)

The Cisco GUIs have always been disappointing. Really, really disappointing. I gave up on them about

6 years ago when I sometimes simply couldn't get them to run on a computer due to the requirements for weird and exotic browser configuration settings which I simply couldn't figure out.

One metric of success might be the longevity of the product or an idea. The CLI has been unchanged since at least 1995 and is way cool n groovy. The GUI thingy has been through more incarnations than Dracula and still seems from this recent report to be crap.

The checkpoint gui has been unchanged in principle for nearly 10 years too.

The Cisco documentation is also pretty decent and keeps improving.

kumail had written this in response to

: I think you should go for Cisco routers. I have personally used cisco products and I am very happy with its result. Moreover i would suggest you to visit because its the cheapest ciscomemory provider I have ever deal with.. NjoY !! :)