Considering IDNet

[esh]

Greetings,
    I had a few questions and wondered if perhaps any of you might be of assistance. I realise this might not be as "ISP neutral" as some other grounds, but I shall not ask questions of other ISPs.

-The other potential contender in a migration was/is enta.net, who sadly do not sell directly to end-customers any more. I am slightly less confident about resellers, though companies like ADSL24 come highly recommended by many. The bandwidth cap is very large, though from what I hear provokes an almost equally large "grind" once the off-peak time starts. Does any one have any comments or experience with IDNet on/off peak? There are periods of the year where the main use is going to be 8pm-8am.

-Is there a fundamental difference between the "home" and "business" packages? The line would be for a small business of half a dozen people, and apart from standard access would be for shifting data around to remote employees and customers, as well as backup - potentially from distant countries. Interactive ssh (frequently with X forwarding) is employed so low latency is desirable. Can anyone comment on a correct package choice for such scenarios? Typical combined up/down totals on average do not exceed 35GB, but this occasionally spikes. Last year, in a rather unlikely scenario, the primary drive and backup drive both failed while at roque de los muchachos, meaning I had to SFTP nearly 30GB a night back to base for a few days. What sort of facility, if any, is there for varying useage rates? Can I upgrade packages easily? Can one move from say, "home supermax" to a business line? I'm also mildly curious about the costs involved in any such procedures.

-Some packages offer 8 static IP addresses, of which I am assuming 5 are useable. Since servers are run here this is potentially useful; but the current line is pure NAT on a single address. What sort of hardware is required to run multiple NAT routes? I can enable such a scenario using the server here, but I'd rather have something independent of the main server to handle network traffic for safety/reliability reasons. The current router is nothing particularly professional - a £40 router which we have two of from many many years ago that doesn't even reconnect after an outage of some sort (another thing I would like to rectify). Phoning up the office to get someone to crawl under the desk and power cycle it is a hazard with so many cables! While I have heard positive mentions of DrayTek routers, these seem to have notably limited port forwarding and I still do not know if it has the required 1:1 NAT/routing capabilities. While the obvious choice is to just jump for a Cisco router, I'd like any other opinions or advice if you have any.

-I'm guessing IMAP is extra? We might shift to running our own mail servers at this rate anyway.

-Any comments on tech support for those who have used it? Currently waiting 90+ minutes for tech support on a mon/fri phone, and a line that isn't particularly cheap either. They also either seem to be lying or don't know what's going on from recent experience - blaming a 20+ hour outage on our router and then it mysteriously fixed a few hours later without doing anything. The next day a "core network notice" was posted online.


Any comments or ideas appreciated. Thanks for your time.

[Rik]

Hi Esh

Welcome to the forum, have a karma.

Most of us are domestic customers, so don't have the background to answer many of your questions. What I can say is that, generally, IDNet deliver the full speed your line is capable of at any time of the day. They guarantee no contention within their own network, so the only problems tend to occur when BT has a capacity problem at the exchange.

The domestic and business products are broadly similar, and the underlying network is identical. You might prefer to opt for a business package with enhanced care though. I don't know how easy it is to move between home and business products, I can tell you that there is no charge to move between any of the home packages, except when downgrading from Home Super Max. Changes can be made pretty much instantly, though the change to or from SuperMax (which I would think you would want, given the higher upload speeds) takes a little longer. I don't know of a variable package as such, domestically, there is simply a £1/.GB charge once you exceed the inclusive allowance (and you will be warned by email if you are likely to exceed your allowance in any month. There is no throttling of any kind.

IMAP is included on idnet.com addresses, as is webmail.

Tech support is via a freefone number, and calls are answered within a few rings by a knowledgeable person who will not be reading from a script. We tend to be on first name terms with everyone, even if we rarely need to call. There is no 24/7 support, though, although there is an emergency 'out of hours' cover. We do our best to fill in here, and can solve some of the most common issues.

IDNet have a policy of upgrading their network before they have to, so that demand never outstrips supply. Over the past year, they have refined their communications, and, apart from the web status page, you can now also get RSS feeds for network and usage. When any planned work is to be undertaken, they will also email every customer.

HTH

[Simon]

Greetings,
    I had a few questions and wondered if perhaps any of you might be of assistance. I realise this might not be as "ISP neutral" as some other grounds, but I shall not ask questions of other ISPs.

Hi Esh, and    Ask away!  I'll try to address some of your points. 

-The other potential contender in a migration was/is enta.net, who sadly do not sell directly to end-customers any more. I am slightly less confident about resellers, though companies like ADSL24 come highly recommended by many. The bandwidth cap is very large, though from what I hear provokes an almost equally large "grind" once the off-peak time starts. Does any one have any comments or experience with IDNet on/off peak? There are periods of the year where the main use is going to be 8pm-8am.

There is no on/off peak with IDNet, other than on the SuperMax package, where you get an extra 30Gb of download allowance to use overnight.  IDNet promise no contention across the spectrum, at any time.

-Is there a fundamental difference between the "home" and "business" packages? The line would be for a small business of half a dozen people, and apart from standard access would be for shifting data around to remote employees and customers, as well as backup - potentially from distant countries. Interactive ssh (frequently with X forwarding) is employed so low latency is desirable. Can anyone comment on a correct package choice for such scenarios? Typical combined up/down totals on average do not exceed 35GB, but this occasionally spikes. Last year, in a rather unlikely scenario, the primary drive and backup drive both failed while at roque de los muchachos, meaning I had to SFTP nearly 30GB a night back to base for a few days. What sort of facility, if any, is there for varying useage rates? Can I upgrade packages easily? Can one move from say, "home supermax" to a business line? I'm also mildly curious about the costs involved in any such procedures.

Can't comment on that, I'm afraid.  I do know that you can switch between home packages free of charge, the exception being downgrading from SuperMax, but someone else will confirm about switching between home and business packages, or you could give IDNet all call on this.  They are always very friendly and helpful. 

-Some packages offer 8 static IP addresses, of which I am assuming 5 are useable. Since servers are run here this is potentially useful; but the current line is pure NAT on a single address. What sort of hardware is required to run multiple NAT routes? I can enable such a scenario using the server here, but I'd rather have something independent of the main server to handle network traffic for safety/reliability reasons. The current router is nothing particularly professional - a £40 router which we have two of from many many years ago that doesn't even reconnect after an outage of some sort (another thing I would like to rectify). Phoning up the office to get someone to crawl under the desk and power cycle it is a hazard with so many cables! While I have heard positive mentions of DrayTek routers, these seem to have notably limited port forwarding and I still do not know if it has the required 1:1 NAT/routing capabilities. While the obvious choice is to just jump for a Cisco router, I'd like any other opinions or advice if you have any.

Again, someone else more technical than me will probably comment on that.

-I'm guessing IMAP is extra? We might shift to running our own mail servers at this rate anyway.

IDNet would be the best ones to help you with that.

-Any comments on tech support for those who have used it? Currently waiting 90+ minutes for tech support on a mon/fri phone, and a line that isn't particularly cheap either. They also either seem to be lying or don't know what's going on from recent experience - blaming a 20+ hour outage on our router and then it mysteriously fixed a few hours later without doing anything. The next day a "core network notice" was posted online.

Technical support is absolutely second to none.  They answer the phone within a few rings, they don't read from scripts, and will give you all the time you need to sort out any issues.  They know what's going on, and certainly won't lie about anything!  The ethics of this company are one of the main reasons many of us are here, and you will find a general purr of content within these forums.

Hope that helps a bit - as I said, someone else will dig in to the more technical stuff for you, but in the meantime, have a welcome Karma!

P.S.  Rik types quicker than me, but after all that, I'm bloody well posting it! 

[Rik]

 

[Ted]

P.S.  Rik types quicker than me, but after all that, I'm bloody well posting it! 

[Sebby]

I think your questions have already been answered, so just a big welcome from me.

[Lance]

A welcome from me too! 

[esh]

Thank you for the replies.

Good to know those few facts about the network. The current package here is 512Kbit down and 832Kbit up for about £40 pcm, however I'm receiving at best half the upband I'm paying for which is somewhat of a nuisance.

Having IMAP in the package with webmail is certainly a bonus, as is the free regrade. It gives a clear upgrade route if it should so be desired.

I shall endeavour to put your advice to good use this weekend - I was a little too pre-emptive getting my MAC code I believe. Wouldn't want it to expire...

Thanks again!

[Sebby]

That's what we're here for. We look forward to welcoming you to IDNet.

[RA-1972]

esh it will be the best thing you have ever done

[esh]

Line migrated thursday 4am, slowly updating all the systems' settings as necessary. The line reports 25ms to the server with 1951kbps down and 707kbps up. Signal seems slightly stronger than previous according to statistics, I shall keep an eye on things. It is at least four times faster than what I was recently getting, and the upband is more or less what it's supposed to be which is good news. Since it's friday night I expect the exchange to be moderately congested, so it could be worth running the test again at another period. I've certainly had at least 800KB/s downloads before my previous ISP blew up.

[Lance]

Great news, thanks for the update

[Sebby]

Excellent news.

[ducky22]

-Some packages offer 8 static IP addresses, of which I am assuming 5 are useable. Since servers are run here this is potentially useful; but the current line is pure NAT on a single address. What sort of hardware is required to run multiple NAT routes? I can enable such a scenario using the server here, but I'd rather have something independent of the main server to handle network traffic for safety/reliability reasons. The current router is nothing particularly professional - a £40 router which we have two of from many many years ago that doesn't even reconnect after an outage of some sort (another thing I would like to rectify). Phoning up the office to get someone to crawl under the desk and power cycle it is a hazard with so many cables! While I have heard positive mentions of DrayTek routers, these seem to have notably limited port forwarding and I still do not know if it has the required 1:1 NAT/routing capabilities. While the obvious choice is to just jump for a Cisco router, I'd like any other opinions or advice if you have any.

You do have the option of a block of 8 IPs (5 usable) and I believe the charge is £5 is you are on supermax or high. £10 if you're on a lower package.

You can do a perfect 'no-nat' setup without a cisco/juniper etc piece of kit. A DG834G (GT as well) is actually a great device for this kind of setup and used by lots of small businesses. I can give you a walkthrough for the procedure if you opt for this router.

Specifically what would you use the IPs for?

[plugwash]

You do have the option of a block of 8 IPs (5 usable) and I believe the charge is £5 is you are on supermax or high. £10 if you're on a lower package.

and afaict it's included if you are on max premium or higher.

[ducky22]

and afaict it's included if you are on max premium or higher.

Fantastic! It'd be nice if they were free on supermax. But that'd just encourage me (more) to play about and waste IPs.

[esh]

You can do a perfect 'no-nat' setup without a cisco/juniper etc piece of kit. A DG834G (GT as well) is actually a great device for this kind of setup and used by lots of small businesses. I can give you a walkthrough for the procedure if you opt for this router.

That's interesting, thanks. I assume you can just set up some routing tables on these devices to just forward the data as required - definitely what I'm after. We run servers here which will soon be catering some services for three domains. I've actually filled up all the 32 port forwarding entries in the current router.

Nice to know that the netgear device supports multiple external IPs. Out of curiosity, what kind of configuration does it need?

Edit to avoid double post!
I just did the speed test again and I have got the exact same speed +- 5kbps. I would've thought there would have been more fluctuation had it been due to congestion. What kind of variability in rates are people getting?

[ducky22]

32 port forwarding rules, hehe. That may actually cause some 'load' problems on a normal consumer/small business type router if all the rules are being used frequently.

Basically you need to disable NAT/DHCP, change the router's internal IP to that of the 'router' IP in the block and leave the WAN IP to obtain automatically. Edit the DHCP scope to be the usage range but don't enable DHCP (this step is actually important but I don't understand why, it didn't when when I missed it out before). You then need to go to the Firewall Rules page and create an Inbound rule to 'send' to each of the 5 usage IPs. The last step is just to bind the IPs to the server(s) or firewall.

I'm actually on a 'red' congested exchange at the moment (http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/?exchange=Dundee%20Steeple&exact=314&plugin=vp) and BT have done bugger all for 3 months to fix it. I see speeds between 5mbit and 7mbit (8128 sync). Upload is usually about 550kbit and doesn't change, 823 sync)

[esh]

The router is a 2mbyte flash, 8 mbyte RAM job. It does okay considering - but yes it has 32 port forwarding rules AND QoS rules on top of that. It fell over a lot before I updated the flash a couple years back.

Having DHCP enabled with multiple external IP's would certainly be a headache, good job you don't have to turn it on! Sounds like the firewall is just acting like a routing table, which sounds fine. Pretty easy anyway, apart from the slightly less intuitive DHCP setup.

According to that neat little tool, my exchange is green. Max attainable rates on the modem is 9Mbit down and 1.1 Mbit up, but it's quite impossible to get faster than ~1950kbit at the moment, which is interesting indeed.

Thanks for your help again!

[plugwash]

What I would do for a setup with some machines on public IPs is get two routers. The first router would be a DSL router setup for no-nat operation. Connected to the lan side of this would be machines you wanted on the public internet and the wan port of your second router. The second router would be a router with ethernet on both the lan and wan sides and would be configured for nat and would have your internal only machines behind it.

If machines need to be on both the internal and public areas of the network the easiest way is probablly to use two network cards.

[Dangerjunkie]

Hi esh,

Welcome to the forums. Have a welcome karma. I've only been here a day myself but so far this seems to be the most helpful and nice bunch I've met  I've not been connected yet (waiting for my BT line to be put in) but I'll offer you any help I can.

I had a few questions and wondered if perhaps any of you might be of assistance. I realise this might not be as "ISP neutral" as some other grounds, but I shall not ask questions of other ISPs.

IDNet customers seem to be a very happy bunch. I don't think I've seen a customer with a genuine grievance that was actually IDNet's fault here or on ThinkBroadband. Most of us have probably ended up on IDNet after being dissatisfied with one or more former ISPs. For example my horror story with Virgin Media is thankfully going to be over by the end of the month.

The biggest thing I would point out is that IDNet contracts have a 1 month minimum term so if you don't like the service you can change ISP at any time. If they were bad and the customers were lining up to leave then they wouldn't do this. Virgin Media, for example, lock you in for 12 months after you sign up.

Does any one have any comments or experience with IDNet on/off peak? There are periods of the year where the main use is going to be 8pm-8am.

-Is there a fundamental difference between the "home" and "business" packages? The line would be for a small business of half a dozen people, and apart from standard access would be for shifting data around to remote employees and customers, as well as backup - potentially from distant countries. Interactive ssh (frequently with X forwarding) is employed so low latency is desirable. Can anyone comment on a correct package choice for such scenarios? Typical combined up/down totals on average do not exceed 35GB, but this occasionally spikes. Last year, in a rather unlikely scenario, the primary drive and backup drive both failed while at roque de los muchachos, meaning I had to SFTP nearly 30GB a night back to base for a few days. What sort of facility, if any, is there for varying useage rates? Can I upgrade packages easily? Can one move from say, "home supermax" to a business line? I'm also mildly curious about the costs involved in any such procedures.

I'm just about to try Home Supermax on a business line. I haven't asked the question but I see no relationship between the grade of phone service BT supply and what IDNet supply to the line as broadband. There quite likely is a problem with this if you were to choose BT as your ISP as they seem to like tying packages together.

If there's a chance you might go over 60GB in a month then I would go with a business package, either Max or Max Protected. These have no download or upload limits. Your line seems to be the lifeblood of your business so I would probably go for Max Protected and think the extra to be totally unlimited and for the Service Level Agreement (SLA) would probably be well spent.

-Some packages offer 8 static IP addresses, of which I am assuming 5 are useable. Since servers are run here this is potentially useful; but the current line is pure NAT on a single address. What sort of hardware is required to run multiple NAT routes? I can enable such a scenario using the server here, but I'd rather have something independent of the main server to handle network traffic for safety/reliability reasons. The current router is nothing particularly professional - a £40 router which we have two of from many many years ago that doesn't even reconnect after an outage of some sort (another thing I would like to rectify). Phoning up the office to get someone to crawl under the desk and power cycle it is a hazard with so many cables! While I have heard positive mentions of DrayTek routers, these seem to have notably limited port forwarding and I still do not know if it has the required 1:1 NAT/routing capabilities. While the obvious choice is to just jump for a Cisco router, I'd like any other opinions or advice if you have any.

I think you can definitely say that nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco. We use literally hundreds of them at my customers' premises in a 10,000+ user environment and I can't remember the last time we had an outage that was down to one of the many Ciscos. You need a bit more knowledge to use one but it is very flexible and built like a brick outhouse. Depending on the model you may also get VPN built into it.

I use IPCop as the firewall in my business ( http://www.ipcop.org ) and I highly recommend it. If you have an old PC kicking about (I use an old Dell Pentium II 266 MHz with 256MB or RAM) put between 2 and 4 network cards in it (I use cards based on the Realtek RTL8139 chip. They are incredibly reliable, well supported by almost every OS and should only cost you about £2-£3 +VAT each) IPCop is enterprise strength, is open source and free (in money but please don't think it's not good because it's available free; It has Stateful Packet Inspection, Snort IDS and an unlimited number of routing table entries. It's kept my business free of trouble and even protected Internet Explorer users and FTP servers from exploits for 3 years with total efficiency.) I've never used the function but it appears to support multiple external IP addresses. Commercial support for it is available if you would prefer the added confidence of knowing you have a company contracted to look after you. I believe IPCop can also link firewalls at different sites and tunnel the networks together so you can have a single corporate network covering all your sites without having to go in and out of firewalls.

I don't think there's any obligation to use the multiple addresses and you could continue to NAT one of them if you wanted. If you are running multiple web servers you could always install an Apache server facing your customers and then use mod_proxy ( http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_proxy.html ) in reverse-proxy mode to bring all your web servers into a single URL space so they look like a single server to the customer.

-Any comments on tech support for those who have used it? Currently waiting 90+ minutes for tech support on a mon/fri phone, and a line that isn't particularly cheap either. They also either seem to be lying or don't know what's going on from recent experience - blaming a 20+ hour outage on our router and then it mysteriously fixed a few hours later without doing anything. The next day a "core network notice" was posted online.

I called IDNet support during business hours on Friday for some advice on which modem I should buy. The phone was answered on the second ring by Miriam. She worked out in seconds that I was technically literate and spoke to me honestly and at an appropriate level. Had I been less competent I think she would also have spoken to me at an appropriate level. It was such a breath of fresh air compared to my current ISP where you end up paying £1 a minute for support to talk to some offshore call centre where the person is reading from a script, doesn't actually understand what they're talking about and keeps on telling me to open "Internet options" in the "control panel" even though I've already told them twice I don't use Windows.

Good luck - I look forward to hearing how you get on,
Paul.

[Rik]

Great post Paul.

[esh]

I think you can definitely say that nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco. We use literally hundreds of them at my customers' premises in a 10,000+ user environment and I can't remember the last time we had an outage that was down to one of the many Ciscos.

Comforting at least. The 857 or 877 is probably the place to be for a business this size. I was browsing a site the other day that specialised in Cisco equipment, found a router for £19,000 and nearly fell off my chair. Fortunately it didn't have Ethernet ports, so I couldn't find and excuse for that one.. (cough)

I use IPCop as the firewall in my business ( http://www.ipcop.org ) and I highly recommend it. If you have an old PC kicking about (I use an old Dell Pentium II 266 MHz with 256MB or RAM) put between 2 and 4 network cards in it (I use cards based on the Realtek RTL8139 chip. They are incredibly reliable, well supported by almost every OS and should only cost you about £2-£3 +VAT each) IPCop is enterprise strength, is open source and free (in money but please don't think it's not good because it's available free; It has Stateful Packet Inspection, Snort IDS and an unlimited number of routing table entries. It's kept my business free of trouble and even protected Internet Explorer users and FTP servers from exploits for 3 years with total efficiency.) I've never used the function but it appears to support multiple external IP addresses.

Something I have considered, though I didn't actually know of IPCop, but it looks like pfSense is a similar piece of kit. The server is Linux with BSD virtual servers so I'm not too averse to trying 'free' things. As for network cards -- we have a massive bunch lying around since in around 2002 every mainboard manufacturer started putting ethernet chips on-board and even those are just fine for the average user. There's a couple Intel Gigabit cards for the heavy duty stuff.

There's a few old PC's lying around. There's an old Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz and still running for over ten years now. The Pentium 3 667MHz had to be retired due to severely erratic behaviour, and I couldn't find a replacement board for it that would take the cartridge-like processors. It seems the actually memory controller degraded so I doubt that's feasible for use. There's a Pentium 4 2266MHz sitting behind me too. That started blue-screening windows at total random, even after a fresh install. It seemed like something nasty was going on with how it dealt with IRQs and was so discarded. I didn't bother doing any more diagnostics on it, and the P4 Netbursts are hardly energy efficient anyway! There is ... a Pentium 133 with 32MB of RAM. But that might even be pushing a stripped-down BSD these days!

I always thought these neat little Micro-ITX boards with the VIA chips on them looked quite cool for a job like a DIY router, but it'd cost you £100+ even without a case for it, so you'd have to be confident of the experiment. They also chew a lot less power -- setting up another PC to deal with something like network routing would almost certainly require another UPS here I imagine. The power supply around here is *terrible*. Still - it could be cheaper than buying a full blown Cisco box. I'll give it hefty consideration. QoS for our SSH is of pretty high importance when there's big file transfers/backups going on, and as I mentioned, not having the router come back up automatically after an outage is a nightmare. For IPCop etc, I believe I'd still need some sort of router though, just plugging it into bridge mode or similar. Internal ADSL modems have always been somewhat of a thing of woe as I understand.

I don't think there's any obligation to use the multiple addresses and you could continue to NAT one of them if you wanted. If you are running multiple web servers you could always install an Apache server facing your customers and then use mod_proxy ( http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_proxy.html ) in reverse-proxy mode to bring all your web servers into a single URL space so they look like a single server to the customer.

That's a pretty good idea too. Currently I've just double the RAM on the webserver and redone the config to use virtual name spaces. It doesn't work with old browsers of course, but we're talking *seriously* old.

Good luck - I look forward to hearing how you get on,

The migration started on Thursday in fact! As you mentioned, with one month contracts, there's not that much to lose when the previous ISP was being so erratic/slow anyway. So far it is very stable, just the down speeds are a little mediocre at the moment. Certainly a lot faster than they were -- we're now at 1.8Mbit instead of 0.5Mbit -- but it's always a little unsettling when you ask around and the average speed is at least twice what you're getting. This might be the "training" period but I've never known that to take very long at all. That said it's a *very* steady 1.8Mbit, it never varies by morer than 10Kbit/sec.

Thanks for your post again, everyone does indeed seem pretty helpful here.

[Rik]

So far it is very stable, just the down speeds are a little mediocre at the moment. Certainly a lot faster than they were -- we're now at 1.8Mbit instead of 0.5Mbit -- but it's always a little unsettling when you ask around and the average speed is at least twice what you're getting. This might be the "training" period but I've never known that to take very long at all. That said it's a *very* steady 1.8Mbit, it never varies by morer than 10Kbit/sec.

What are your line stats, have you done a BT speed test?

[esh]

Max attainable up is 1.1Mbit, max attainable down is 8.8Mbit with about 7-8dB SNR downstream and 16db SNR upstream. I was using the thinkbroadband speed test and speedtest.net, but also was testing by downloading from some of the other sites I use which easily have at least 0.5MB/s up. The thing I find of note is that the 1.8Mbit down is very very stable, so it's certainly not congestion. I'll try and do another one in a bit.