[jiml8]

I needed a firewall/router appliance for a server that I was going to deploy at a server farm. My particular requirements are not demanding because my server is proprietary and I won't have any standard ports open. I will order my server app to open ssh only when I need it and all remote management work I do will go through the ssh port, and otherwise that port will be closed.

So I figured I could go with pretty much anything that blocked ports and did NAT. I live in the boonies and going to a dedicated computer store is a drive. So, I wandered into the local WalMart and found a NetworkEverywhere NC041. It did NAT, it forwarded ports, it did 100 Mb/s on the internet. Everything I needed. Further, the packaging made me think it was a Linksys, which turned out to be true.

So I bought it.

I set it up on my LAN, with my server connected to it, and I configured it to think it was on the internet (except I used DHCP to give it its network address, rather than fixed IP). Setting it up was a bit of a pain; the firmware got confused, messed up the routing table, and caused me to have to do a reset to factory settings in order to get things sorted out. Also, it seemed that port forwarding wouldn't "take"; I had to enter it several times before the box recognized that I was forwarding a group of UDP ports.

Finally I got it working, and it seemed to work fine. I exercised it and the server together for a couple of weeks while I finished the software development on the server and buttoned everything up. Server performance was quite acceptable, and I was ready to deploy.

Yesterday I deployed at the server farm. When I switched the router to use a fixed IP and gave it its address, the routing table got confused and compelled me to do a reset to factory defaults. I then had to set the whole thing up again; username, password, port forwarding (which again didn't seem to "take"), and so forth. So I did that, and when I left the NOC at the server farm, it seemed to be running.

Since then, I have been debugging my "plug and play" installation because of router problems. Somehow the routing table got screwed up again, which caused me to lose control of my server and made me go back to the NOC today to sort it out. Now it is working fine, except that the router is sometimes taking several seconds to respond to packets coming from outside. I have been on the phone to the NOC for awhile and we have been talking while I remote controlled the server and both they and we pinged it.

Comes down to the fact that the router is sometimes not responding for several seconds. Here. Try it yourself. In Windows, open a command line window and type in :

ping -t 64.56.119.2

(This will only show a problem until I get that router changed out...if the date is Dec 16 or later please don't ping)

Not the time for the pings to return. It is all over the map, taking as long as ten seconds, and the problem is the router. Why? I don't know.

So I hit the website to get a firmware upgrade, if available. Well, there was an upgrade available on their site. It is 1.2.03, from May of 2003.

Too bad the version on the router is 1.2.06. Not only that, I had to download the bloody update before I could read the docs to find out what version it was.

The "support" page on the website says that they only provide assistance with basic functions on the router; advanced functions are not supported - RTFM (it says "read the help files"). So they are going to have no idea why the router is behaving the way it is.

I don't intend to fool with it; it isn't worth it. I also have recently become aware of a problem with a recent Linksys router, that people are describing as "slow". I don't think "slow" is right; I think "buggy" is right.

In any case, this router is a real POS, and I rate it an absolute "avoid".

Edit:

Well, I just was working with VNC on that server, accessing the router from the inside by the web interface, and I changed the operating mode from "gateway" to "router". The thing promptly went down. I should have enabled remote administration on the router before I changed anything, but I didn't. Consequently, I can't control the router anymore and, since the mode change, it is pinging without problem. I think the bug is in the NAT code in the router, or in the stateful packet monitoring. Being in "router" mode rather than "gateway" mode turns off the firewall code, I think.

So, if you ping it, it'll look OK. But I have lost control of it. $$#&T%)#@#