Looks like I got in there with my CBT purchases at just the right time (I.e the whole of the last 18 months).. Download packages (as opposed to streaming – much less flexible) seem to start from $499 now, rather than the $299 I paid for most of the packages I’ve bought previously ;(
Not saying they’re not worth it, but it’s a big jump.
.. of a Draytek 2910. This was while testing the throughput on a new Virgin Media link. Initially, VM Support told me to set the LAN card on a laptop to 100/full and plug it directly in to the external port of the router. This resulted in a 2Mbps throughput of the link, and triggered VM to come out and adjust light levels.
I thought that the 100/full may be having an impact, so set the card to 1000/full and immediately saw the full 100Mbps obtained from the link. Result.
This was still with the laptop plugged in to the external port of the router, and one of our external IP addresses assigned to the NIC. I added a new “External” VLAN, and plugged both the external port of the router, and the Draytek (which is very much a “standby” bit of kit used for testing – we have a Checkpoint cluster in production), into ports in this VLAN, and I could only achieve 30Mbps.
After verifying that all the port speed and duplex negotiations were correct, I decided to have a dig online – and found several references to the fact that the maximum throughput of the device was 30Mbps (there are a few exceptions – someone has got 40 out of one, but it’s definitely not 100!). The last time I used the Draytek in a testing capacity was when my last fibre connection was installed – but at the time, this was running at 25Mbps, so I wouldn’t have seen the limitation. D’oh!
I’ll know for sure when I carry out the project to make the new connection the primary of two, using our Checkpoint cluster and auto-failover between the two. Gulp.
Jims' Network Diary - musings of a network admin 