Any body have anything good/bad to say about Cisco 850 series?

[nonrev]

Any body have anything good/bad to say about Cisco 850 series routers?
I looking at it for 2 reasons.

First I’m studying for my CCNA and needed a router that had the Cisco ios on it to practice. I’m looking at the 851w because wireless is a must.

Second my home network is growing to a point where the traffic is starting to bog down my D-Link. Also have tried Linksys with same results poor performance.

I figured I’d kill 2 birds with 1 stone.

 

[StevenD]

While I cannot comment on the Cisco routers (I use a CheckPoint router at home), I would recommend splitting up your router and wireless access point. That way you can upgrade either without affecting the other.

 

[Pepper]

You can find 2500 series routers which also run IOS and are extremely cheap since they are a couple of generations back. Still the IOS functionality is 99% the same. A 2514 has two ethernet AUI ports @ 10Mbps.

We use the 2811's at work and I couldn't be happier with them. Like Steven said though, I wouldn't dream of integrating wireless into the same device we use for our core routing.

 

[falconlem]

Hello, I'm a MCP and I've also just started studying for the new tests for mine, I have a enterprise level cisco 2500 series 2514 router with cisco router cables. There is one on ebay right now for 40 bucks!@!! here's the item number 170213971141

If you have a good laptop, studying basic routers like this one that are still in 40 percent of small businesses is the way to go. You really need to work with this level because you can get all the latest firmware and revisions and of course add a 3500 level switch for more advanced studies later on which integrates nicely. I recomend also buying a different brand router to investigate other manufacturers... true they are only 10 or 20 percent of the market. But it helps to know others out there. Many state governments use off brand routers.

 

[mike123abc]

I actually just ordered an 851 for my business. My cheap router was crashing all the time when remote VPN connections were being made. I decided it was worth $250 to have a solid router vs another $50-100 on a cheap no name router.

 

[docpadds]

You can find 2500 series routers which also run IOS and are extremely cheap

Actually its relatively easy to find a 2600 out there for a good price considering their abilities, especially models like the 2611XM which have enough ram/flash to run a recent IOS with all the 3DES/IP/FW feature sets. I just offloaded about 6 of mine to ebay, they went in a snap. Honestly cant say i have every had one die on me since they were new, and i have had many many of them over the years

I use at home a 1720, again cheap and easy to use, has dual ethernet and full FW/IDS set, cost me $70 plus about $20 for more ram. Beside that I have a 1231 Access Point... not cheap but you can find AP350s out there that run IOS (I beleive 12.2) cheap. This combo gives you IOS router and an IOS Access Point in separate boxes, plus the AP350 uses a power injector giving you the ability to run the power over the ethernet cable to it.

With something like a 1700 series you can get real fancy and use vWICs etc in them, there are lots of options to play, i mean work with them

-Jonathan

 

[Peter Parker]

Haveyou considered the Nortel product line specifically the 22?

 

[nonrev]

Not really, this I just need something to study with. I figured I'd upgrade my network while I'm at it. This is not a mission critical investment.

 

[Peter Parker]

agreed but the Nortel product is ata simialr price point.

 

[mike123abc]

My 851 is installed and working now. It was a bit of a bear to get going (never worked on cisco routers before). But, it had a lot of features I really liked. The big brother is the 871 that can do separate subnets on each of the 4 ethernet ports. The 851 is limited to one net on the 4 port switch side and of course the WAN on the other port.

For a while yahoo.com was not working. Found out the router firewall was dropping packets from yahoo.com because they were malformed http. I disabled its http filtering. The 851 really has a lot more firepower than the linksys box it replaced. The network was generating too many open sockets for the Linksys to handle at once and it would run out of memory and lock up (at least that was my theory).

It is $250, quite a bit more than the Linksys it replaced (about $65). It is a lot more complex but really the scripting language is not that hard if you are familiar with setting up something like iptables or other firewire software on Linux/FreeBSD. The 871 is $450 has a bit more functionality, but way more than I need for my application, but it might be better for training considering it can do multiple Vlans.

 

[snathanb]

agreed but the Nortel product is ata simialr price point.

Which means nothing if he is buying a router to use for studying for CCNA certification.

I've have a current CCNA and CCNP, but I have started putting together a cisco network of my own (via ebay) to prepare for the CCIE lab test.

 

[Peter Parker]

Sorry missed the CCNA part. My bad.