サン電子 Rooster G8.0 (SC-RS810G)

rooster G8 home page
IOS used is RS810G-3.00, May 29 2009 17:01:51

We bought one of these to run some gear in a shop. A moderately large supermarket. We actually have a number of their earlier model deployed
and for people considering a wireless (as in HSDPA) router, here is a quick review.

One word summary “don’t.” Unfortunately, the choice for HSDPA routers is very limited and so sometimes you have to buy these things. For one machine, an HSDPA card in a pcmcia/usb adaptor is a much better bet.

If I find a better HSDPA router, as in one that works. The roosters will be jumped on.

Nice things about it.

Amazingly enough, they actuall mention that there might be some GNU stuff in there, a grand total of 1 paragraph on page 1. This is a big improvement.

Well, the box is nice, it’s brown and made of cardboard. The manual is small and unedifying in that unique way that manuals are, where you read it and arrive at the end wondering who the main characters were and if Hollywood will make a movie out of it.

The actual router manages to avoid being a shapeless piece of ugly black plastic by being roughly betamax shape with some blinkenlights on the ugly black plastic. And unlike its predecessor, it doesnt crash when you eject the pcmcia card!

Not so nice things about it.

Where to start? It would be unfair to compare it to a Yamaha RT router since Yamaha routers cost less, work longer, harder, better, are not unstackable shapeless lumps of ugly black plastic, have a better interface, (telnet/ssh in English as well) different colour plastic and a feature set far in excess of the rooster (bgp/ospf/radius/firewall and so on). If they supported wireless cards, we’d have 200 of them instead of roosters. No, that would be unfair.

So that’s what we will do. Fair is for losers.

• Telnet interface speaks SJIS and only SJIS. (Yamaha is euc/sjis/ascii!)
• Firewall features are awesome. (Yamaha firewall is merely excellent.)
• Mail account settings are useless. (Yamaha mail notification works.)
• Logging, it claims syslog but you can’t set the facility.
• The awesome firewall features.
• Virtual servers cannot route to different ports. (No such limitation.)
• Reboot for even the most insignificant changes. (Yamaha is a real router!)
• Dynamic dns support. (netvolante DNS.)
• VPN …

Admitted, Yamaha firewall/nat/masquerade doesn’t like bit-torrent and skype but
that can be fixed by blocking those annoyances. If you have to use bit-torrent to download those american tv shows, it may run out of nat slots and melt.

In theory, the virtual server lameness is dealable with, most of the 400 plus places only have 1 machine and thus doing things like port 10000 to port 3389 on machine A, port 10001 to port 3389 on machine B, is unnessary. But the best solution is a pcmcia adaptor and an HSDPA card per box. That’s how good the roosters are.

To clarify the awesome firewall. More often than not, the rooster will decide that return packets such as responses to HTTP requests, DNS queries, are evil hackers and block them. The solution is to reboot or disable the firewall completely.

Sorry, but there actually is one nice thing about them.

The hardware watchdog works.

Afterword.

Zoolook.

If this gives the impression that the writer doesn’t like Rooster routers, that is entirely intentional.