David gets a Router

August, 1995

Visions of routers dance in my head. Visions of CSU/DSUs, with sparkling red lights like Christmas in August, hopping up and down and saying "Oh, David, did you really make the right choice?"

Yes. Or no. Or maybe. Here's what happened.

1 Network Providers

Network providers are busy people. If you call a network provider, you're lucky to get their voice mail. On a good day. And this isn't to slam Joe McGuckin; he's a great guy. From what I can see, all network providers are like this, Bad day or good.

My network provider wanted to sell me a router. And yet he peered into the maw of his router supplier's inventory, and lo! There was not a single one of the critters to be found.

Normally, it's best to get your router from your net provider. They'll sell one cheap just so they can configure it for you; that way, they don't have to act as Cisco's unpaid technical support team. But what if they're out of routers? You guessed it: You get your connection, and not your router.

Oh routers great and small, where can you find one? Let's look together.

2 The Friend

I have a friend who ran an ISP business that went belly up, leaving her with one (1) Cisco 2501 router. Naturally, I was sorry about her business, but the existance of the router and 56k CSU/DSU made me perk up.

Unfortunately, it had 16MB of "original true-blue Cisco memory". $ 1,340 just for that. Ulp. I was the whole router and memory was really worth about $ 1,700. They wanted $ 2,500 for it. Or more. Bad deal.

3 The Vanishing Portmaster

Someone responded to my enquiry on USENET about a router, with a comment that he had a Livingston Portmaster for sale with 56k CSU/DSU. $ 1,500. I gave him a counteroffer of $ 1,250, which was all I thought I had. He thanked me for the offer, said he would consider it, and vanished.

4 The Frad

So I called up my favourite supplier, Craig Warner of CERAM. "Craig," I plead, "Could you find me a nice used router, like a Livingston Portmaster or something? Pretty please?" Craig said he didn't sell any such things, but he did have a suggestion: A FastCom EtherFrad. The name sounded impressive enough, and he told me that it was what he used, and it worked fine.

Alas, it turns out that the Frad is half a router. It can sort of do routing, but not between subnets. I only learned this after a frantic day-long struggle, when I tried everything possible to get it to work. Craig was very helpful, but at the end of the day, nothing could be done. (We got it set up so my Sun could talk to the router, and the router could talk to the Internet, but the Sun couldn't talk to the Internet through the router. Well, oops; that's what a router's supposed to do).

5 The Cisco

Joe dropped me a line with a comment that he could get me a router and overnight it today, but he didn't respond to my further enquiries. He said that I should "get a real router" instead of a half-solution like the Frad.

And so I thought I should check out Cisco, since I knew they made real routers. A call to Cisco yielded a referral to a local dealer, who promised to sell me a Cisco 1001 for $ 1,650. Lots more than I wanted to spend, but I could have barely afforded it.

Fortunately, Joe called me before I could make that deal, and revealed that the 1001 could only be used in a network with other Cisco routers. Phew! Narrow escape there.

6 The Daymare

And so I placed the order with Joe, and he told me that he would have it overnighted to me. And so, today, on the day of the router, I have been looking sharp all day, wondering when the router will come. Every time the door slams in the building, I look frantically around for a UPS or FedEx guy. But no. No router arrives.

I keep on having these recurring daymares. In the middle of the day, I will break out in a cold sweat and wonder if there really is any such thing as a router. I wonder if this is just a massive conspiracy created by network providers and telephone companies to keep their hapless customers in line. Is my router floating in the sea of UPS or FedEx at this very moment, or is it stuck in a delayed assembly line, never to be seen again? What has happened to the Router? Will I ever see one?

Not yet, anyway. It's after 3:00p, and the router has yet to make an appearance.

Stay tuned.

7 The Router Arrives

A day passes. Then I get a mysterious call from Joe's supplier. The Router is available, and it will be here on Friday.

It was. As I gazed at the matte black box with its membrane touch panel, I was truly amazed that it had finally happened. Yes. I have a router now, and I can FTP at high speed and view all sorts of neat WWW pages. Bottom line: It's worth every penny. I enjoy graphical pages and image maps instead of flinching whenever I see one, and I can see how people get quickly spoiled.

I'm getting some images for my home page now, and it has sprung up with a few "modest Netscapisms" since I can preview them so nicely using Netscape on the Sun.

Will I sell out and create an image map next? Stay tuned to my pages and find out!

(Well ... maybe just a small one).

Postscript

It's now mid-November, and the Router has been humming along flawlessly since that happy day in August when it finally came. Its blinking lights (green and amber, not red) give my office a pleasantly cheery aspect, like a tiny Christmas tree.

One person asked me what kind of router it was. Oh dear, this isn't quite fair, is it? For me to tell you all this stuff about Router brands and not let you know which one it is?

It's an Imatek OnRamp router + CSU/DSU combination. So far, I couldn't recommend the thing too highly; since I plugged it in and turned it on, it's been flawlessly reliable.