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Hungry Hacker Review: Cayman 3546-002 Router

A while back, while on the hunt for routers, I managed to pick up a slightly used Netopia Cayman 3546-002 router, but unfortunately I recieved it the same day I'd already shelled out $55 for a shiny new D-Link DI-524 (with the 802.11g access point built in).

So unfortunately, the Cayman sat there doing nothing - that is of course until I decided to upgrade my ADSL to static IP addresses. I kinda knew my D-link wasn't going to support multiple IP addresses, so I asked them about a router. SBC told me I could have a nice new Cayman 3346-N for free if I signed another one year contract. Well after being stuck on contracts before I wasn't about to sign another one... Wait a minute. Did you say "Cayman"?

I pulled this little blue bastard down off the top of the hamster cage and looked up it's manual online. Through a feature known as IPMaps it does indeed support multiple static IP addresses. Wheee!

I hooked it up (it's built in ADSL modem takes away some of the clutter around our phone), and got online in minutes, before jumping on my mom in law's computer to check the connection there. "What the hell is this shit?", I cried as I was confronted with a message similar to "maximum number of WAN users exceeded".

It turns out that because I had to nuke the password from the router, I also had nuked the licenses that SBC ship with it. After checking the forums on Broadband Reports, I found that I needed some keys and that Netopia would be more than happy to give them to me.

Netopia's tech support opened bright and early at 6am PST, which suited me well as I had to leave for work in an hour and a half. So I call them up (510-597-5400 at time of writing), I breezed through a whopping one menu item (rather pleasant to say the least, compared to say, ATT or Sprint) and after sitting on hold for 30 seconds or so I was greeted by an actual person. After giving her my first name and the serial number of my router, they sent me to a website where I could grab the free keys.

http://www.netopia.com/SBC.html

Entered my serial number, filled out an "order" form, downloaded my keys and sent them off to my router. I now live happily ever after.

Downsides

There's been some reports of this modem "hanging" or the noise level creeping up until you reboot it. I've not experienced this yet but of course your mileage may vary. I'll write back if I notice anything. As of this moment, the modem has been running non-stop for months, it hasn't had a reboot in 33 days (last time I changed an IPmap presumably), and my noise level has stuck at 13.5 dB/17.0 dB for downstream/upstream respectively. I imagine either these people got a dodgy router, or they have issues with their line and not their hardware.

Another downside is the Cayman's apparent lack of the ability to specify static DHCP addresses for your LAN clients. I noticed this almost immediately, but using IPMaps I probably won't need it much any more.

The "BreakWater" firewall is pretty corny too, but the un-publicized "DeadReckoning" mode that comes with firmware 6.4 suits me just fine. Some of the menus are laid out funny, but show me a web-based router configuration that isn't.

Features

There's a lot of nifty features on this "Soho" router that make it really stand out, though even now they're still a bit on the steep side on Amazon.com. They're well worth the money in my opinion, if you want a small-office caliber router as opposed to a home-caliber router such as the D-Link DI-524 - which now the fact that I spent almost $50 on something that's basically attrocious has worn off, I am able to say is a piece of shit.

IPmaps is of course a very nice feature to have if you support multiple static IP addresses on your ADSL line. Configuration is dead easy: outside IP, inside IP, click add. Reboot the router. My only complaint is the router isn't smart enough to route requests from inside your lan that go to public IP addresses, back to your inside boxen.

One of my favourite things about this router is that it comes with a pretty well complete SNMP server built in. I say pretty well because everything you could want to read is there, but I'm not so sure about it's capabilities to write, because honestly I've never used them. But if you setup a host with MRTG (as I have done) it'll suck information straight off the router.

The logging on the Cayman 3546 can be almost as terse as you want it to be. It shows vanilla errors, warnings and status information under the Troubleshoot menu in a standard line-by-line system log. However, it also has a seperate log called a "Security Monitor Log", that lists events like port scan attempts and things like that. It's reasonably descriptive, but I would personally have liked to see the scan type (Vanilla SYN, Xmas tree, etc). By the way, the router was able to correctly identify more than just a Vanilla SYN scan.

One final feature, which unfortunately must be purchased seperate, is that this router can also act as a fully fledged VPN endpoint. So if you have a VPN server at your main office, and this router at either a leaf office or a home office, simply setup the keys on it and you have a permanent VPN connection. No messy windows clients, it'll all just simply work. Of course, having the entire LAN routed over the VPN makes you question the integrity of your LAN a little more, but that's your problem not Netopia's.

On the whole, despite the price tag, this modem is definitely worth shelling out the money for if you want more than just the average router nonsense (multiple static IP addresses for example).

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