Network Computingwww.networkcomputing.com

To get the Pipeline up and running, we connected a cable to the serial port and ran through the menu-driven interface to set the configuration. Ascend's menu system is identical in every one of its remote-access devices and is accessed through a telnet session. It takes some getting used to, but we ultimately preferred the feel of this n on-GUI interface.

Shiva Corp. AccessPort
Shiva AccessPort came well-equipped to support small-office administration, but it lacked feat ures to tie in with Shiva's central-office solution, the AccessSwitch. We found AccessPort to be one of the easiest devices to set up through the included Windows GUI for our LAN-to-LAN routing test.

Shiva's long-standing, product-wide management interface, Shiva Net Manager, has been one of the simplest management interfaces, so we were disappointed that AccessPort was not supported in the application. Configuring the central-site LANRover/E AccessSwitch was fairly simple, and the central-site switch brought advanced LAN-to-LAN routing capabilities that enhance its ability to contact the remote SOHO device transparently from the central network.

AccessPort's native small-office management application, Shiva Monitor, is supported on the Windows95, NT and 3.1 platforms, but it was flaky when we tried to configure it through a null Ethernet cable between the management station and the router. We resorted to using the included serial cable for configuring the device, even after the initial configuration (this bug seems to have been ironed out in the 1.5 beta release of the AccessPort software, which Shiva also sent for us to test). The application includes all the necessary extras for small-office management, including a somewhat detailed call-tracking log and a convenient testing feature to check whether the router is correctly signaling the ISDN switch at the central office.

Like the other routers we tested, AccessPort lets you restore its configuration from an externally saved file. But while other routers' configuration files were scripted in straight ASCII text--which is easy to rescript when deploying several routers at once--AccessPort's configuration files are stored in binary text from the configuration wizard, making multiple deployment of AccessPorts a hassle since you can't clone one profile.

Overall, Shiva Monitor provided the best single GUI application and small-office support of all the devices we tested. However, we were looking for something that would manage on a much broader scale. Monito r is focused on supporting AccessPort; updated configurations cannot be shared among Shiva devices. We liked some of Monitor's simple management features, including call-tracking support and a clickable diagram of the device.

One major advantage of AccessSwitch was its advanced LAN-to-LAN routing management capability from the central office. Routing was especially easy to manage on AccessSwitch, though you need not use AccessPort to take advantage of these AccessSwitch features. We set up routes from our central site and were able to connect seamlessly to nodes on the small-office network. This made it possible to use Shiva's small-office management application from the central office where we could configure and track calls on AccessPort.

AccessPort's telnet interface proved disappointing. All of the other vendors, ex cept U.S. Robotics, offered a menu-driven telnet interface that drastically eased remote administration and flattened the learning curve. In Shiva's case, we had to pull out the documentation to use the command-line interface to configure simple parameters, like outgoing ISDN numbers, on the device.

We also tested Shiva's new Dynamic IP Address Translation (DIAT), which manages addresses at the home office by assigning an open address to the incoming device on the central-site network and conserving the available addresses rather than dedicating an address to each device dialing in. This addition in version 1.5 greatly enhances the management of IP addresses from the central site.