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08/29/2008: "LinkSys RV042"
So I finally finished some of my home network setup a couple of months back - installing a router that can fail-over cleanly from the Cable Modem to the DSL connection. I went by price and features - I couldn't justify spending a huge amount on something that I only really needed every couple of months - if the cable modem is out for an afternoon, go to the basement and switch over to DSL for a while.
The reviews were really mixed. Lots of people loved it, but lots of people just never got them to work right. Well, I can really understand people having problems - I could get the first port to work great, but the second port seemed to always fail to connect. I fought with that off and on for days. I took extensive notes on what I tried (which I can't find right now), even did tracing over the wire of all the network traffic. Whenever it finally seemed like it would connect, it would drop offline from the DSL by the next day, and refuse to reconnect. There was some really helpful advice from some verizon techs on various bulletin boards, but it just wouldn't keep working.
Finally, I tried one final thing, that no one had mentioned - I set the MAC address of the RV042 to the same value as what the DSL modem showed that it presented to the network (from it's status pages, when just connected to the modem - not what the modem showed to devices that were connected to it over ethernet). That meant that when the DSL modem was effectively in passthrough mode - allowing the RV042 to do the authentication, the RV042 looked like it was still the DSL modem. That finally did it. No mention anywhere of Verizon needing that - they all talked about perhaps waiting a couple of minutes. Instead what I was seeing that you could get a different MAC address to work for a while, but by the next day, something was reset, and you had to be back to the original MAC address of the DSL modem. Very frustrating.
Overall, now that its working, the RV042 is pretty decent. It is a bit slower than directly connected to the cable modem, and it seems to occasionally block outgoing requests with policy violations that I can't figure out, but it does route traffic over both Cable and DSL. It can do lots of filtering, stateful packet inspection and so on, which is useful with kids in the house.
When I can find the notes I took, I'll see if there was anything else that needed to be done - it did take a while before I could get it to work even moderately well - I know that I _HAD_ to do a full reset of the device before the second network port would work - just powering it off and on did not work. Seemed like whatever state they left it in from the factory was screwed up somehow, despite going an configuring everything.