Plus.Net responding OK

After we took the the trouble to gain Plus.Net's attention over the issue of a No-NAT service for their business ADSL their support manage has been attentive to the issue. We are seeing some results.

We're told they don't currently support No-NAT on the ADSL routers supplied for their business connection. We were given wrong advice when we signed up for a contract with them.

However to give them their due, Plus.Net have been responsive.  They have found us details of a work around which, after a bit of tinkering by us, has provided us with No-NAT  connection through the Thompson 585 ADSL router they provided. The device is a bit greedy for static  IP addresses. From a block of four IP addresses you are left with one usable address. So we've requested a block of 8 new addresses via Plus.net; let's hope they have a spare 8 IPV4 hanging around.

Even better Plus.net had a spare Netgear N300 Router which is "better at No-NAT". we've received that by courier about 20 minutes ago, so when I've some spare time we'll fire that up too and see if it replaces the Thompson unit.

From the information I gathered from Plus.net it looks like they are ramping up their business offering in terms of support and features like No-NAT but it may be a few weeks/months before that works through into what the public (businesses) see in terms of delivery. The No-NAT configuration workaround we have is not supported at the moment, but if they continue their progress I suspect that will change.

If there is any doubt about the need for No-NAT I can say I've just spent the past 8 working hours resolving a problem where Microsoft FrontPage, used by an external creative, refused to work with one of our servers which is presently behind a NAT firewall. All of our web editing software has no problem, just the damn Microsoft product thinks the world is different. Grrr!!

Oaksys

ps. We spoke too soon.  The saga continues.