[TriLUG] OT: Wired Gigabit Router Postscript, or Post Mortem...

Tue Oct 13 14:44:34 EDT 2015

Hi Lee,

No luck with the EdgeRouter Lite.  I could find no means of specifying
the  PPTP client's remote subnet or subnet mask. 

I don't know whether these parameters are essential for a PPTP client
config, but the DD-WRT, Ubuntu, and Windows configuration editors for
PPTP client setup all have them and I had no trouble setting up those.

The only PPTP client interface config information I could find on
Ubiquity's website didn't provide a means to specify these parameters. 
What little info they had was in a wiki page, which was removed from
their website during the time I was trying to get it to work.

I did what most of the other new users wind up doing, which was to post
asking for help on their forum site.  I had a few of their experienced
users try to help out, but none of them appeared to have a PPTP server
to test against and their advice didn't work.

The Ubiquity products are widely held to be a breakthrough in power for
price.  But they are very "work in progress".  There is no graphical
configuration for the PPTP client config.  It's command line based for
now.  I made some progress experimenting with the command line
parameters, but I reached a point where I got the web interface to crash
and reboot the router a couple of times.  After that I put the thing on
the shelf and went back to my old DD-WRT/54GL.

I will probably give up the notion of going wired-only for my home
office and get another one of Intrex's TP-Link routers one of these
days.  It's a weird shaped, unstackable appliance with a radio I don't
need, but cheap and reliable.

   Scott C.

On 10/09/2015 01:52 PM, Lee Fickenscher via TriLUG wrote:
> Hey Scott,
> I'm now in a position where I could use a similar device.
> I want a dedicated p2p VPN back to the office's Cisco 5505.
> Have you had any luck getting it going?
>
> -Lee
>
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 5:43 AM, Scott Chilcote via TriLUG <
> trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
>
>> Hello LUGers,
>>
>> The reason I was looking for a wired-only router in my earlier thread
>> was to connect my home office computers to my employer’s VPN.  The
>> product I wound up purchasing was a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite
>> <
>> http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeMax-EdgeRouter-ERLite-3-Ethernet/dp/B00CPRVF5K
>>> .
>> Or “ERL”, as its dedicated, cult-like fan base refers to it.
>>
>> As it turns out, buying this router for such a purpose is like going to
>> the hardware store for a stud finder, cracking off the shrink-wrap, and
>> finding out that you have brought home the Starship Enterprise rev. A.
>> You think about taking it back to the store, but then it occurs to you
>> that within seconds of arriving in a solar system it can locate and scan
>> all of the planets, tell you whether they have atmospheres, are
>> inhabitable, and harbor civilizations.  So really, it ought to be able
>> to tell you where the snippets of metal behind your wallboard are hiding.
>>
>> Instead of comprehensive documentation, all you have is a 16 page Quick
>> Start Guide.  And it doesn’t even include the word “sensor”.  But on the
>> other hand, there's a website address…
>>
>> If advice like “The graphical configuration support is very much a work
>> in progress, so most users get the job done using the command line
>> interface” Spark your sense of intrigue, this might be your ideal
>> product.  And if you really begin to salivate when you see that the
>> software is a fork of the open source network operating system Vyatta
>> 6.3, you /may/ have already waited too long.
>>
>> I’m three weeks into setting up this pint-sized 3 port obelisk,
>> attempting to accomplish what I was able to do in five minutes with
>> DD-WRT by filling out a handful of text fields and clicking "Apply
>> Settings".  I spend an hour or so a day wandering through the support
>> forums on Ubiquiti’s website, waiting to see if one of the veteran users
>> will be sufficiently bored enough to share a crumb or two of laboriously
>> extracted knowledge.
>>
>> I should have taken the hint and sent it back in the original box when I
>> found that the instructions for configuring a client VPN were not in the
>> product specific manual (there isn’t one), and not in the 50 page PDF
>> manual for the router’s operating system.  I eventually found those in a
>> wiki file on the company’s support pages, but it took Google keyword
>> searches to ferret them out.
>>
>> But like John Cleese in Monty Python’s cheese shop sketch, “I am keen to
>> guess!”  So on it goes.  Why settle for incremental progress when you
>> can seek out new life, and new civilizations?
>>
>> Scott C.
>>
>> --
>> Scott Chilcote
>> scottchilcote at ncrrbiz.com
>> Cary, NC USA
>>
>> --
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-- 
Scott Chilcote
scottchilcote at ncrrbiz.com
Cary, NC USA