Cisco Wireless-N VPN Firewall – Router

2 Review to this product

• 

  Huh? Wha?
  December 30th, 2010 on 7:29 pm

  Rating

  Ok, after waiting for this to come back in stock for a few weeks, I finally got it. I’ve had Linksys, D-Link, and Netgear network hardware, and wasn’t satisfied by them. Yes, I know Linksys is owned by Cisco, but let’s face it, if you know networking, you know they AREN’T the same.

  Now before I get flack for my title, the setup being easy is relative to your savvy. If you’ve never heard of VPN, don’t know what QOS or SPI stand for and actually mean, this probably isn’t the route to take. There are TONS of decent home user level routers that do what you want, and are probably a bit easier to determine what features you want to use or don’t want to use. Now, for the rest, this is a decent buy.

  Not that I’m a CCNA or above, but I know when I don’t get what I want out of a router. I also know that I love to tinker with my tech toys, and this gives me the freedom to giggle like a fool while I fiddle with the features. All in all, thumbs up.

  Pros:
  
  * Price. Let’s face it; the Cisco Small Business line is a smashing deal. Cisco gear at a decent price? That’s not to say that Linksys or Netgear doesn’t make their “Professional Series” gear with the same functionality, but I trust Cisco. At ~150 bucks, you can’t beat it.
  
  * All the nitty gritty features that everyone wants, but no one wants to setup via the CLI, can be done through the web setup interface. In fact, you have no choice (that being said, don’t go nuts on this point until you see Cons).
  
  * Logging. Yes, logging. Basic, but necessary. The routers I’ve known didn’t have logs available.
  
  * Status reports. View how your router’s doing. Things going slowly and suspect an attack? You can check your router’s logs and the reports to see if things indicate an attack. How many home users can say that?!

  Cons:
  
  * No command line option. At least not that I’ve read about or seen. Correct me if I’m wrong. I’m not sure how viable this is for a business as this is the case.
  
  * Setup can be a bit touchy, though overall it isn’t bad. The detecting router portion of it was a bit flaky, but again, not something that was a deal breaker.

  Conclusion:
  
  This is a power users router, or an extremely small business router that doesn’t have a network administrator/NOC. Not something I’d implement if you have those things and if you need completely customized configurations. It just won’t have all the flexibility or power of a higher scale solution.

  I’ll update this after I use the router more, but thus far, it’s neat. We’ll see if the Cisco quality came along with the branding on the small business series.
• 

  Randall B. Rubinstein
  December 31st, 2010 on 5:19 am

  Rating

  This is a great product and very easy to setup. I wanted to have a separate SSID for guests and with a quick phone call to support they helped me easily set that up. It’s been running for 3 weeks with any problems.