Tata DOCOMO 10/20/50/100Mbps High Speed FTTH Plans

I don't use a typical router. I've plugged it directly into my server running a Juniper VM.

Why Juniper?

mgcarley said:

Why Juniper?

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Juniper's VM is free to "evaluate" and doesn't have any restrictions. It's also the only one which works properly in VMware long term without eventually crashing or slowing down. pfSense and Linux based distros all have buggy drivers or don't support some features like 802.1p QoS when using VMware's high performance virtual NICs. Cisco's VM has no free release.

I need it to failover certain protocols conditionally with two ISPs, as well as provide Internet access to LAN devices which can only be accessed via another router (L3 switch). The reason I have the double hop is so that Internet traffic shaping can be applied to all the LAN subnets as a whole.

The affordable hardware routers are all fixed function and have inflexibly labelled "WAN" ports and have no way of working with a LAN side router. I'd have to get a full fledged JunOS or IOS hardware device.

The advanced features are also easy to use in JunOS. You can create filters to match the beginning of application layer protocols based on byte level pattern matching and route them through a different ISP etc.

But even though Juniper has a nice OOBE, we discovered performance is crap under high load compared to some others.

There are probably simpler ways to do what you want to do - some routers I've been playing with lately will let you assign any port(s) in any way you like (I think the new Ubiquiti EdgeMax devices can do it, they're based on Vyatta) and some of the (what used to be) Linksys VPN routers have up to so many WAN ports - I had a 16 port device in my house and I can use up to 8 of them for WAN, software configuration is pretty easy although the UI is crap - but that device has just been retired in favour of a Mikrotik routerboard which I just upgraded to RouterOS 6.2 today.

mgcarley said:

But even though Juniper has a nice OOBE, we discovered performance is crap under high load compared to some others.

There are probably simpler ways to do what you want to do - some routers I've been playing with lately will let you assign any port(s) in any way you like (I think the new Ubiquiti EdgeMax devices can do it, they're based on Vyatta) and some of the (what used to be) Linksys VPN routers have up to so many WAN ports - I had a 16 port device in my house and I can use up to 8 of them for WAN, software configuration is pretty easy although the UI is crap - but that device has just been retired in favour of a Mikrotik routerboard which I just upgraded to RouterOS 6.2 today.

Click to expand...

Both Vyatta (EdgeMax) and any Linksys hardware devices don't allow conditional routing based on protocol identification or even simple port number matching. My only other choice is RouterOS but I've read it has a lot of bugs compared to even pfSense. Due to high latency on Tata, I need to route game protocols and Steam through Airtel.

The biggest annoyance for me was actually the failover time. Almost every one I tested takes 30 seconds to failover no matter how I configure the threshold. Even a complete PPPoE disconnection doesn't failover for 30 seconds! If I manually disconnect and reconnect PPPoE to change my IP address the Internet won't work for 30 seconds. In that regard, the current JunOS VM is instantaneous. If I disconnect one, I barely lose 1 echo reply in a running ping test before it fails over.

Also, it did NOT have a nice OOBE. It took me 2 days to get a PPPoE connection up with failover. They have a misleading web UI which doesn't show half the settings and it's actually impossible to set up a PPPoE connection from the web UI. I finally just typed everything in notepad by hand and pasted it into the config file. The order of the entries matter for some things and you can't do it using even the CLI! You have to use an external text editor to modify the config file so you can cut and paste stuff in different orders.

I'm currently switching between pfSense and JunOS and trying out different things in each. pfSense is a LOT nicer but not as stable and has unnecessary delays in connection / disconnection and failover.