[Wylug-help] SpeedTouch 706/716 VOIP Router (Was Wannadoo ADSL)

[Dave Fisher]

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 09:09:22AM +0000, James Holden wrote:
> I'm going
> to buy a Speedtouch 706 so I can use VOIP.

I can't find that model, but I own a Speedtouch 716g and would strongly
recommend against it. 

It's a pile of crap.

The hardware may be OK, but the software and the web interface were
written by imbeciles.  The documentation is of the standard I've come to
expect from consumer hardware, i.e. short and dumbed down to the point
of incomprehensibility.

There seems to be no way to run it as a pure and simple classic ADSL router,
i.e. to establish an ADSL connection then route traffic to/from a server on
a static public IP address.

It does allow you to put machines in a DMZ, but you have to specify
their identity using one of the private IP addresses on the router's
internal network.

It assumes that you have only one public IP address and (worse) that the
public IP address itself is dynamically assigned.

From what I can see, the only benefit you get out of putting a machine
in what it considers to be a DMZ, is that you don't have to specify
port-forwarding rules for every service, i.e. it passes on traffic to
all ports.

I haven't got to the bottom of my problems with this router yet, but I'm
getting '502 Bad Gateway' errors from a zope installation proxied
through apache.  

The error is not being reported on sites served directly by apache, so
I'm not sure if the router itself is causing a problem that only
zope detects or if zope's error handling is picking up something that
stock apache is ignoring.

Insights from Apache/Zope/Plone gurus would be appreciated.

Dave