I’m looking for a robust consumer router that can do the simplest routing function of all — simply forward packets between the WAN and LAN interfaces. The option of NAT’ing the RFC 1918 addresses would be awesome, too.

Spoiler alert: after several very long conversations with ZyXEL NA tech support (including the managers; by the way, ZyXEL’s tech support is outsourced to Anaheim, CA), I was told that noone makes such devices for the consumer market at all. Is that really true?

I have a 99.124.xxx.xxx/27 Static IP address allocation from AT&T U-verse FTTP; however, the way it worked with 2Wire is that you still get a single regular “dynamic” IP address via DHCP from their common and shared 76.220.xx.xx/22 pool, through which all your traffic to your static IP addresses (in a totally different subnet, as you may have noticed) is then routed. The 2Wire 3800HGV-B then has a setting called “Public Networks” → “User Defined Supplemental Networks”, where the user has to manually specify the allocation they have received; subsequently, for each individual device on the LAN (as well as in the default options for the LAN DHCP server itself) you can either assign a public address from the public pool, or a private address from the private pool (with the option of specifying which public address the private address will be NAT’ed to). However, I’m getting rid of 2Wire PoS due to the unlimited number of bugs, stability issues, as well as unacceptable power consumption (2× to 3× higher than the devices below, without even supporting GigE or 802.11n).

Prior to buying the routers as below, I’ve tried connecting my OpenBSD netbook to the Ethernet port on the SBC ONT directly, to see if I can indeed ditch 2Wire 3800HGV-B PoS, and after some playing with `ifconfig` and `route`, indeed was I getting all the packets for the static block from the internet without any problems!

I’ve got a ZyXEL NBG4615 to replace 2Wire, then subsequently NETGEAR WNR3500L to replace ZyXEL. Both were (and still are) marketed as routers. When setting up each, I’ve changed the MAC-address to the one used by 2Wire, and set up my /27 subnet to be used for their LAN interfaces. Apparently, both ZyXEL and NETGEAR happily do NAT of publicly routable IP addresses instead of passing it straight, and neither one can do packet forwarding (also known as “routing”, surprise!) between the WAN and LAN interfaces without the NAT.

The ZyXEL does have an option of disabling NAT, so, according to their interface, it’s all supposed to work just dandy. However, apparently, in practice it doesn’t do any routing between the two interfaces once the NAT is disabled (I presume they erroneously also do something like `sysctl net.inet.ip.forwarding=0` or `sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=0` when you disable NAT), so my internet simply stops working immediately and as soon as I disable NAT within their interface. I’ve contacted the ZyXEL tech support, and they seem to misunderstand what routing is all about, they also claim that no consumer-oriented router can do routing without [also] doing NAT. Is that really true?

In any case, I tell them they have a clear bug with their user interface not functioning the way anyone would expect it to, yet they repeatedly conclude that they’ll only address the problem if other comparable products on the market also have the feature (“have implemented their own feature set correctly”, they mean?). Pardon me, but how are the obvious bugs in one’s interface are related to any other products by any other manufacturer? Especially if all that’s concerned is literally a one-byte change (0 to 1, that’s merely a bit even!); strike that, most likely is merely a matter of actually removing one or more lines of code that disables ip forwarding through sysctl when NAT is disabled through the interface. After all, this GigE router is based on Linux 2.6, from what I gather and based on nmap.

The NETGEAR doesn’t have any options to disable NAT in their default firmware. Although, to be fair, I would argue that having a default of doing NAT of non-RFC1918 addresses is a major bug in and of itself, and any NAT-disable options in any interface are only really meant to apply to the RFC1918 addresses in the first place.

So, just out of curiosity, any consumer routers that can actually do the simple routing, please?

Is AT&T’s setup of two different subnets (as explained above) really so uncommon in the ISP world to not get any attention of third-party consumer router manufacturers?

Am I actually doing something wrong, and is this whole thing supposed to be configured some other way? Or is this really too advanced and is not supposed to work with consumer off-the-shelf routers at all?

Any firmwares to recommend for WNR3500L that were actually thought out to be a great fit for packet forwarding and multiple routable IP addresses, over two subnets as above? I just want my subnet to work, nothing too fancy, really. That said, it would be disappointing to actually have fewer features than what was available back with 2Wire, e.g. it would be nice to continue having the ability to have two IP-address pools for my LAN, one public and one private. A SIP registration server, HE’s IPv6 TunnelBroker.net support and authoritative DNS would be a plus, too, though. SNMP won’t hurt, either. (-: Looking for something stable that I could install with uptime of months, and which would not break when I need to make simple changes of adding new LAN devices etc.

P.S. BTW, apparently, the ZyXEL tech support guys in Anaheim quite misunderstand what routing between two interfaces is all about. They claim that I want some kind of “advanced router”, whereas their product only offers NAT routing (what is “NAT routing” anyways? do they mean “routing + NAT”?), disregarding the fact that they explicitly have the option of disabling NAT in their interface, where the router is still advertised to be in the Router mode (they have a separate option to select the Mode between Router Mode, Access Point Mode etc). I assume that their NAT-disable option not only disables NAT, but also sets `sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward` to 0. ZyXEL tech support suggested all sorts of things, from using the router in bridge mode, and configuring my host computers to be on my /27, yet somehow have me specify the AT&T gateway from the shared /22 (I’m, like, really?).

Written for, and discussion at, http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r26754312-Any-consumer-routers-that-can-do-routing-