Technology by Jacob Dybala

I hate to sound like a Netgear basher but I stopped buying Netgear equipment at work. As a matter of fact, I banned my staff from purchasing the company’s products. Harsh, right? Well, consider this: 5 Netgears dead within 12 months. Not a single 3Com or Cisco didn’t died on me. Netgear does off the quality it once did and their products are more prone to breakdowns than ever before.  The recent problems speak for themselves. Before you blame power or the administrator here’s all the information:

Hardware:

4 Netgear WN802T dead
1 Netgear router dead (I don’t remember the model, but it was a recent one)

Installation sites:

3 x Work (WAP)
1 x Home (WAP)
1 x Customer site (router)

I think I have one more Netgear WN802T around in the building but I’m pretty sure I’ll find it soon when my users complain that wireless isn’t working. It’s going to die for sure. I mean with such a bad quality record I can’t believe that Netgear equipment is worth investing in. I try and keep my firmware up-to-date (those who know me know how true this statement is!) so the problem was not old hardware. With 3 different locations you can rule out power problems (30 mile distance between sites).

Damn flickering light

I just remembered: my Gigabit Netgear switch died at home not that long ago. Sure, it got replaced but I expect my equipment to work. Is that too much?

If you are trying to set up a PPTP VPN access and cannot connect to it using a Windows "dial up" or Windows VPN client. Usually, users will get an error message when using the built-in Windows VPN support: "Error 800: Unable to establish the VPN connection".

Either way, if you have a Cisco PIX 515 or Cisco PIX 515E and are having problems with PPTP VPNs (publishing and using) just run this through the command line and the firewall will allow PPTP traffic to flow through:

fixup protocol pptp 1723

There are more popular protocols that the Cisco PIX seems to break in their default setup and these include SMTP (TCP port 25) and FTP (TCP port 21).  SMTP going through a Cisco PIX is very problematic as is encodes the characters a little differently then you would want it to and usually no mail is able to go though.  You cannot send or receive.  Just enter the commands below in your PIX and you should be good to go!

fixup protocol ftp 21
fixup protocol smtp 25