Linksys firewall/router has teeth

Last week, Network World ran a review of five midrange firewall/router devices. The author, David Strom, made a comment that Gearhead takes issue with: "Linksys . . . [makes] hubs that offer some minimal network protection for a few hundred dollars. But if you want to be serious about keeping the bad guys away . . . you'll probably end up considering one of the more expensive units."

Now, Gearhead recently took a look at the LinkSys EtherFast Cable/DSL Router and begs to differ. In keeping the miscreants out, the LinkSys box does all you need until you need to get very serious and at half the price of the bottom end of the products covered in the review, it is a far better value.

As a side note, how many of you actually use the other features of the higher-end firewalls such as logging, user authentication and content control? For example, do you review your logs regularly and have you ever actually used a log to troubleshoot? If you use those devices in a branch office or small officer/home office setup, we'd bet these features are used even less - if at all!

Anyway, the LinkSys EtherFast Cable/ DSL Router provides router services as well as being an Ethernet switch with either one or four LAN ports depending on the model, a WAN port for cable modem or DSL and an uplink port. Built-in services include Network Address Translation (NAT), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), IP filtering, port forwarding, static and dynamic routing.

NAT is a core feature - this is a service that maps internal addresses to an external address thereby hiding your internal network architecture.

Setting up the LinkSys Router is easy. By default, the device is configured from a Web browser and monitors on the network address 192.168.1.1 (in case you're not aware, the address ranges 10.X.X.X, 172.16.X.X and 192.168.X.X are for private networks and aren't supposed to be forwarded by routers).

You'll have to reconfigure a PC so you can set up the LinkSys Router, and you need to tell the LinkSys Router what the ISP's assigned address is for your connection (assuming that your ISP doesn't use DHCP). You'll also need to define the LAN address range, whether to use DHCP and what address range it should use, as well as the maximum number of users to support (253 is the maximum).

You can enable "block WAN requests," which prevents your network from being pinged, set up for static or dynamic routing, enable port forwarding, block LAN users from accessing the Internet and block specific ports on Internet servers (for example, to block Napster traffic).

At less than $200, the LinkSys EtherFast Cable/DSL Router is a winner. Ten gear teeth out of 10.

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