I got DSL service installed a couple weeks ago. On Saturday, I moved my server from my colo (Zayda.com -- they're great) to my house. I get a lot of traffic on my server, about 700 kbps during the middle of an average day.
Yesterday, my DSL router crapped out twice. The first time, it came back up after about 5 minutes. The second time, it wasn't completely down, it just seemed to be routing packets incorrectly. When I pinged it, I would get no response for the first 6-8 pings, then it would respond every time after that. This one required a router reboot.
Today, it completely conked and didn't come back up until my wife rebooted it. This is not making me very trusting of the ActionTec router. Has anyone else experienced similar problems? In the past when I had DSL, I used the Cisco 675/678. Are those better at handling high traffic?
Steve Meyers
I have some experience with both, both personally and professionally.
My experience has been that the ActionTec router is unstable in high load situations (roughly >=600k sustained load for more than a few minutes). The worst was one location with an ActionTec that required rebooting approximately once every week (spontaneously unreachable, never could determine for certain why). Other locations were not so bad, but had lower traffic.
Once it was replaced with the 678, it did not have problems (about 6 months now, more or less).
I have had similar experiences elsewhere. I think the root problem is some sort of ARP failure, either the cache on the ActionTec getting messed up or a failure to resolve at all. Symptoms I observed were spontaneous packet loss under load, complete dropping of all packets, then occasional recovery, but most times a reboot was necessary. I haven't ever had the time/opportunity to really get to the root of the issue though.
The thing about the ActionTecs is that they are considerably less expensive than the 678s. The ActionTec, when doing the rent-to-own thing from Qwest is about $36 (you own it after a year. Buying it outright is ~$70, because of some silliness in how they are marketing). The 678s were going for $90+ on eBay last I looked.
Plus Qwest claims to no longer support the 678 on new installs. If you know the ActionTec well enough you can get around that (not that I am advocating lying or anything :-).
Adam Augustine
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