Dead Ink Vinyl

I received the Cisco SOHO 97 router yesterday and configured it today. First, I must comment that the Cisco SOHO 97 is a more more impressive box than my old SpeedStream 5861. The Cisco has many more diagnostic LEDs and they are much more informative than the SpeedStream’s LEDs. The Cisco does have a console port on the back, which was a feature for which I had hoped. An observation that struck me while unpacking the router was that the Cisco seems to be significantly lighter than the SpeedStream, which leads to an impression of cheapness in some way. But, of course, a router’s worth is not measured in its weight.

Connecting to the Cisco Router Web Setup was a bit more work than I had hoped. First, I tried to connect to the router from my Mac OSX laptop with Safari and I had difficulty loading the Java applet used for the . That miffed me a bit, so I fired up IE 5.2 on the laptop to try accessing it again. That, too, did not work. After some experimentation, I found that I had to use IE from Windows to use the Web Setup.

The Web Setup user interface was fairly nice. I have a block of static IP addresses, so the setup was not going to be the usual quick setup most people can use. The application had a “Scenario Setup” which allows the user to pick from a half dozen templates for “advanced” configuration. The first option was the one that was of interest to me: static IPs, NAT, DHCP. I entered all of the information required but was not able to connect.

I used the application’s Test Connection functionality and it informed me that my user name or password were incorrect. Throughout my router setup, I was greatly impressed with the Web application’s ability to diagnose connection problems and suggest corrective actions. I called the SBC Yahoo DSL service line and walked through a quick automated interaction that reset my password. I entered the new information into the router. Here I encountered an imperfection in the UI: Cisco Web Setup does not re-populate the form fields with their current values. I had to type all of the information again. Through the course of the setup, I ended up re-entering all of the information several times, which did not endear the application to me. Anyway, I entered the correct the information and was still unable to connect. The Test Connection utility informed me that my WAN IP address or DNS servers were not correct. Hmph. Well, the DNS servers may well not be correct, but they are the ones tech support had given me.

Getting worried, I jumped into the application’s quick setup screen. The screen nicely informed me that it was only to be used with dynamically assigned IP addresses. Still, it was worth a shot. I entered the information and held my breath. It worked. I received a dynamic IP address and was assigned DNS servers.

While poking around the Web application, I navigated to the VPN setup. I was very distraught to be informed that VPN was not supported. The application informed me that I would need to update the IOS software to access VPN functionality. I am a bit piqued about that, as VPN was one of the features that attracted me to this router. However, I won’t froth at the mouth if updating the IOS software is all that is required.

So now I am happily surfing again. I think I will try the static IP setup again using the dynamically assigned DNS servers I have now.