The Treehouse Blog

When I am occasionally asked about what might be used for networking two random buildings together, the first two thoughts are generally private DSL and wireless.  I’ve not had any personal experience with private DSL, but I know that Patrick had used it in the past, and I think he had used Flowpoint gear.  As I have a possible project in the works, and want to know a bit more about what I’m talking about, I bought a group of  5 FlowPoint 2200s on eBay.

Configuration didn’t go terribly smoothly.  While I was able to setup a typical 9600-8-N-1/no-flowcontrol rollover connection to the boxes, they would seem to not recognize keystrokes after the boxes booted.  If they were configured to do that, I haven’t been able to figure out how.  Fortunately with watching my DHCP server to find their IP addresses (they seem to try to lease them even when statically configured), and using the password override which thankfully works on telnet and not just console, I was able to reconfigure all but one of them.  The last one refused telnet connections (presuming a firewall setting).  If anyone has any idea what might be wrong with the console setup, or other ways of resetting the box, I’d be interested to hear.

As for the point-to-point, or what they seem to call back-to-back portion of the configuration, I found a document describing the setup process.  The routers would link up using this, but would not seem to bridge.  Bridging would be a much easier and more elegant solution for the applications I’m looking at.  I switched the protocol to RFC1483 instead of PPP which seemed to allow the bridging configuration to work.

While approaching ancient, the Flowpoints appear to be the cheapest back-to-back SDSL options out there.  Mine do seem to have a max speed of 1536 kBPS (that’s a T1 less ESF overhead, iirc), but that would probably be fine for my needs.  Anyone using better cheap gear?