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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.