MultiCom Technical Support

Support

To protect critical data, the (optional) encryption functions of the MultiCom routers have been extended as well: besides the International Data Encryption Standard (IDEA) with a 128-bit key encryption, the LIGHTNING routers now also provide the Data Encryption Standard (DES). In Europe, DES for PPP link-level encryption, even if less strong than IDEA, is required for some projects and uses and allows 40-bit and 56-bit key encryption as well as Triple DES with 112-bit and 168-bit key encryption. Additionally all LIGHTNING MultiCom routers now integrate a firewall.

Additional features include:

Multilink PPP (PPP/MP) with channel bundling for fast and flexible connections at 128 Kbps and more
Cost-free call-back over the D-channel
Web-based Management of the router from any browser
Backoff reset: the permanent error state of a site is reset after a (configurable) amount of time to avoid that the site stay in an error state indefinitely
Dynamic DNS negotiation: the MultiCom can send and receive the DNS configuration over PPP
Dynamic IP address allocation: the Multicom can send an IP address to the remote end of a PPP link. The address can either be configured statically, or dynamically allocated from a pool
The "Never Busy Line" feature can now be turned off: some sites can be given priority over the others

Minor stability improvements have also been done in following areas:

The DHCP NetMask is not based on the "IP SubnetMask" command anymore
PPP header compression negotiation is more lenient with bad implementations (incompatibility with SCO Unix)
Leading 0s in IP addresses were no longer supported
The subaddress type was not implemented correctly
Empty PPP passwords were not supported in the Setup command
The X.21 mode was broken on the LAN Access Center
The "Setup" command did not support setting DNS address without domain name
Closing the Telnet connection abruptly with ^] could keep the line up
PPP EchoRequests polling can now be disabled