MTA In Front

Posts: 66 · Full Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2003 Posts: 66

Now, I've gone back to a basic config and it has been stable for a day:
* VT1000 running 1.16d firmware, running in no NAT bridge mode - has public IP address #1
* Linksys BEFW11S4 v.2 wireless router - has public IP address #2

Toshiba cable modem --> VT1000
VT1000-PCport --> Linksys WAN port
Everything else connected to the Linksys switch ports.

It's been running great for 18 hours - I've been doing constant pings, VPN connections, video streaming. No failures. I am now thinking that I was just having a RoadRunner problem before.

Posts: 66 · Full Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2003 Posts: 66

Now running great for 2 full days.

Bob

Posts: 10 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 12, 2004 Posts: 10

The biggest problem I had with the vt1005 in front was that it was sucking up about 2/3 of my bandwidth. With the 1.16d firmware upgrade this problem has been fixed.

Posts: 66 · Full Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2003 Posts: 66

Dan, that makes no sense. Regardless of whether the Motorola is front or not, you need 90K of bandwidth for the outbound voice stream if you have selected highest voice quality. Getting the Moto in front just allows the Moto to throttle back the non-voice traffic when you have voice to send. This is what you want. If the Moto is behind your router, your outbound voice and data traffic compete equally for your limited bandwidth and a portion of both will get dropped. For data, this is not a big deal. But for voice, it means the party you are talking to hear garbled sound.

Bob

Posts: 20 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 03, 2004 Posts: 20

In my case, I was caught between two conflicting needs. Having the MTA in front does allow it to control the bandwidth throttling, but it makes a pretty crappy firewall under high load. Even with it set to pass-through, heavy load (I'm serving a website and do remote access frequently) would cause the whole shebang to just lock up far too frequently.

Maybe, once Vonage gets the initial kinks out, the next product offering would be an "industrial stength" MTA. Maybe crawl into bed with somebody with some firewall and router creds and build a real MTA router- like my VPN router which manages the tunnels itself.

That would be great for a "business class" of service, too.

Posts: 10 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 12, 2004 Posts: 10

Hey Bob. Maybe I wasn't clear about what was happening. With the moto in front, WITH NO PHONE CALL TAKING PLACE, I had about 2/3 the bandwidth available for downloads as I did without the moto between the cable modem and my pc. The vt1005 was throttling traffic at a rate much higher than the highest setting in the 'bandwidth saver.' Vonage tech support said it wasn't possible either, but I have seen a few posts on dslreports.com describing the same problem. At any rate, the problem is fixed with the new firmware.

Posts: 66 · Full Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2003 Posts: 66

Weird, DanG. --Bob

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 11, 2004 Posts: 2

Just wanted to relate my experience with placing the Moto out front. My config is Westell DSL modem>>>VT1000>>>Netgear RP614v2. VT1000 running firmware 1.16d. I have had the Moto behind my netgear for the past 2 moths, it has worked flawlessly and received firmware updates from behind the router without fail. After reading this thread I thought that I would take the plunge and move the Moto out front and take advantage of QOS as my measley Verizon DSL connection is 1500/128 actually running about 1250/135 at the best of times and I was getting complaints of choppy audio from the called party periodically. Also I was experiencing some DTMF distortion when accessing distant voicemail and interactive systems etc. In any event I moved the Moto out front this AM and unchecked NAT to make it a bridge. Everything has seemed to work flawlessly. I have made several test calls both local and LD with no complaints and my problem with distorted DTMF sending seems to have vanished as well. Looks like the QOS is working as it should. I do have one problem which I need some help with. I know that this question has been raised in other threads but I haven't been able to find them so please bear with me....I'm just an old phone guy with enough computer knowledge to be dangerous but evidently not enough knowledge to figure out why, now that I have set the Moto to bridge mode, I can no longer call up its web access on 192.168.102.1 Any help most appreciated

Posts: 66 · Full Forum Member Joined: Dec 15, 2003 Posts: 66

Yeah, you're hosed. The Motorola does not provide for access from the outside. One way I believe would work would be to add a 2nd interface on a PC, connect it to a hub/switch attached to the PC port and address it 192.168.102.200 or some such on that subnet. Of course, the Netgear router outside interface would also be connected to the switch.

Another way is to temporarily address your Netgear outside interface as 192.168.102.200 or some such - then you could reach it with any host on the inside of the Netgear. I've tried this and it works, even if the Moto is configured with NAT/DHCP turned off.

Bob