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SART2-4115 Review

SART2-4115, 5 Port Router

This article was written by Neo – it is by no means a thorough review and more may be added at a later stage.

Main features:

  • Supports ADSL/ADSL2/ADSL2+
  • Rate adaptive, downstream up to 24MB / upstream up to 1MB
  • Integrated 10/100 Mbps 4 Port Fast Ethernet switch (MDI/MDIX Auto Sensing)
  • Built–in NAT function (allow multiple PCs & devices to share single
    Internet connection)
  • Web based configuration & management
  • QoS Bandwidth management
  • MAC Address Filtering
  • UPnP (Universal Plug & Play)
  • VPN pass through (IPSec, PPTP)
  • Support SPI (State full Packet Inspection) Firewall
  • Support NAT & Firewall enable/disable
  • Support Virtual Server/Port Forwarding
  • Support DMZ host configuration
  • Support Up to 8 PVCs
  • 4 Ethernet ports and 1 USB port
  • Chipset: TNETD7300
  • Input power: DC 12V/1A
  • Memory: 2MB flash & 8MB SDRAM

Connection

Connecting up the router is pretty easy – the minimum you need to do is:

  1. Insert the power supply plug into the router and insert the mains plug into your wall socket.
  2. Connect an Ethernet cable between your PC and the router.
  3. Connect the RJ11 ADSL cable between your microfilter/ADSL socket and the router.
  4. Switch the router on…

Assuming that you use the first LAN port, the power light and LAN 1 lights should come on when you switch on the router. Then after a few seconds the ADSL light should come on to show that the router has successfully synchronised with the exchange. If this is the first time you are using the router, the PPP light will not come on (yet). When your router is fully set up and you are busy using the Internet you should see the connected LAN lights and ADSL light flicker.

Set up

Having checked that my PC was setup to obtain an IP address automatically (and DNS too) I was able to type in “http://192.168.1.1” into Internet Explorer and get to the login screen. The default login details are printed on the inside of the box and were ‘Admin’ and ‘Admin’ in my case (remember these are case sensitive):

4115_001

Clicking on the Log In button takes you too the ISP details/Smart Setup page:

4115_002

The idea is to select your ISP from the list, enter the username and/or password provided by your ISP and then click on the “Click to Apply” button. Unfortunately when I tried this the router didn’t seem to store/use my ISP login details and still said I was offline.

I decided to enter the details manually so I clicked on the “Advanced Setup” link. This takes you to the full web interface:

4115_003

From here I clicked on the ‘Setup’ button across the top and then the ‘ISP Setting’ link on the left hand side:

4115_004

Because it still said ‘BT’ under the ISP type, I just entered my ISP username and password into the boxes arrowed above and click on Apply. Within a few seconds the Connect / Disconnect buttons became enabled (they looked like this): 4115_005 and the PPP light on the router came on.

The next thing I did was tried to browse the Internet and use my email software and that worked fine, which confirmed that I was indeed connected. You can also check your ‘online’ status by clicking on the ‘Status’ button and then on ‘Connection Status’ – you should see something like the screen shot below:

4115_006

There should be two DNS addresses from your ISP and a gateway address which will be the IP address of your ISP.

Note: When you make changes to the router’s settings and apply them, they usually take effect but aren’t actually committed to the router’s memory. This means when you switch the router off it will forget any changes made since it was switched on. The solution is to go to Tools -> System Commands and click on the ‘Save All’ button after making all the changes you want to make – this will make the router remember.

The absolute minimum security precaution is to change the Admin password so that’s what I went for next. Familiarising yourself with anything new takes a while but because there are so many options it took a while to find out where it was. For quick reference it is under Tools -> User Management:

4115_007

A quick check on ‘Shields Up’ from www.grc.com showed that the router’s built-in security was doing it’s job. If all you want to use your router for is to get one or more PC’s online it’s very easy to setup. The Smart Setup page should have worked better and may confound some people, but apart from that it was painless.


Features

Comparing the SART2-4115 to my previous router, I have to say I’m quite impressed by the number of features available (that is of course assuming they are all working as expected!). Thing like QoS Bandwidth Management, UPNP and SNMP will appeal to many.

SNMP

SNMP, Simple Network Management Protocol, is a way for you to monitor network activity. Depending on what the router makes available you can monitor the activity of the Internet connection and devices connected to the router.

In order to extract any meaningful information from the SNMP data that the router produces you normally need to have some software running on your PC which will collect and analyse it for you. One popular choice is PRTG Traffic Grapher (which I will refer to as PRTG) from http://www.paessler.com/ – they have a free version which is adequate for
most home users.

Setting up SNMP is pretty straightforward and I will use PRTG in the example below:

  1. On the router, click on the ‘Advanced’ button across the top and select ‘SNMP’
  2. Enter any name and location you want to help later identify your router. What you enter for the location is unimportant unless you have many routers dotted about your building. Most people can leave the Community name as ‘public’.

    4115_008

  3. Start up your SNMP software – in the case of PRTG, a little popup appears:

    prtg01

  4. Follow the instructions for your SNMP software to add a sensor – for PRTG, just click on the popup window.

    Most of the default options can be left as they are so it’s simply a case of clicking ‘Next’

    prtg02prtg03

    prtg04

    Clicking on the ‘Next’ button as shown above will have selected the Standard Traffic Sensor for SNMP and will now allow you to enter the router details

  5. Just type in the name of the router (whatever was decided in step 2) and the address of the router, which is normally 192.168.1.1 for the SART2-4115:prtg05

    The SNMP port can be left on the standard 161 value and the SNMP Community can be left as ‘public’ (since that is also what was determined in step 2).

  6. Clicking on ‘Next’ gets PRTG to scan your router for SNMP data and then shows you what ports are available to have ‘sensors’ attached:

    prtg06For the SART2-4115, the main ones are the eth0 (Ethernet ports), usb0 (USB port) and ppp0 (essentially the Internet connection). Selecting these and clicking next will take you to the next step.

  7. Here PRTG gives you the option to group the sensors – you are free to choose whatever options you wish (if you have several routers you place them into differerent groups) but the default options are perfectly adequate for this demonstration.

    prtg07

  8. If everything has gone to plan you should be presented with PRTG’s nice graphing interface. From here you can select individual sensors or view multiple sensors at the same time. From here you can explore all the different options your SNMP software has and you might want to read through your SNMP software’s documentation.prtg08

    prtg09

Oddities

Strange things, bugs etc

  • It seems that monitoring the SNMP and using a reasonable amount of bandwidth causes the router to lock up or behave erratically. When viewing a webcam feed, for example, PRTG will suddenly say there’s an error and the feed will stop in the browser. Sometimes the router will recover but on more than one occasion the router needed to be power cycled.
    This could be specific to SNMP data or it could indicate a bigger fault on dealing with high bandwidth usage.
  • Changing the IP range for the router was a little quirky – it seems that setting the DHCP release time to 0 seconds causes it to try to assign an IP every second rather than stop assigning one.

Firmware

It’s worth noting that the default firmware supplied by Safecom uses several components (MontaVista Linux, uClibc, BusyBox etc) which fall under GPL. This means that Safecom ought to (by law) release the full source code for this firmware and their failure to do so means they could well be sued and deserve a place here: BusyBox – Hall Of Shame


Last updated by Neo on Saturday, August 29th, 2009
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