Trying out Intertex’s IX66, Part 1

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing our trials, tribulations, and limited success with getting messaging clients to work through SOHO – and, for that matter, enterprise-class – firewalls. In response to these newsletters, Ingate invited us to test a product from its sister company, Intertex.

The products from the two companies have similar capabilities, but the Intertex products are designed more for small offices and branch offices, while Ingate’s products are focused more on the enterprise.

The product that we are testing, the Intertex IX66, is a combination router, firewall, and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) registrar.

The router and firewall configuration is straightforward, and the capabilities are rather extensive for a product in this category. With a price tag that’s a bit above the norm for your mass-market electronics superstore consumer router, it also has a lot more capabilities. Thus, it seems to be a great fit by itself as a router for the branch office environment.

But it’s the SIP capabilities that we were most interested in. The good news is that they work. There’s no need for an external SIP registrar; that’s built in. And SIP traffic is appropriately handled by the firewall. We even found out about a service, DynDNS.org, that provides a DNS server for devices with dynamic addresses. See this week’s WAN newsletter, which Steve writes with Joanie Wexler, for more details on this twist.

We now have our SIP-compliant addresses, and we’re looking forward to testing some SIP phones so we may opine on those for you. But the path to getting connected had several bumps along the way. We’ll let you know about those next time.