Xincom XC-DPG602

Continuing our evaluation of routers that support two WAN connections, we looked at Xincom’s XC-DPG602. This baby lacks VPN support, but does have inbound load balancing.

The quick-start guide is exactly that, covering all necessary details on both sides of a 5- by 7-inch paper. The manual is clear but very short (50 pages) for a complicated router. The router only supports Microsoft Internet Explorer browser (which the guide doesn’t mention), but the DHCP server works correctly, and the box grabbed network setup details from the cable modem quickly and accurately. In fact, this box resets and reboots faster than any we tested.

Configuration for both WAN ports occurs on the same page of the admin utility (side by side), which is a nice touch. The WAN ports can be configured as backup or be load balanced, and load balancing has its own configuration page. You can set balancing by bytes, packets or sessions established, and then set the load percentage on WAN1. We put the cable modem on WAN1 and set it to carry 90% of the load. When we unplugged the cable modem, the streaming music almost always continued without missing a beat over the DSl link. Unfortunately, the Xincom couldn’t always reset the DSl connection when it was unplugged, and we had to reconnect the link manually.

Multiple DMZs can be established, using one or more of the four 10/100Base-T Ethernet ports on the unit (there is no dedicated DMZ port). There is no easy way to filter traffic from the LAN to the DMZ or back (as the ZyWall 70 and SonicWall units do), but individual DMZ session links can be controlled through the Advanced Setup page. The Advanced Setup menu also includes Advanced Features, which has a handy checkbox to tie SMTP traffic to one of the two WAN ports, ensuring outgoing e-mail goes through the proper network.

A firewall with SPI is included, although the left-side menu says “Security Management” rather than “firewall.” Various service ports can be blocked easily, but drop-down menus only provide six types of services, compared with the huge number from SonicWall. Blocking or opening ports in the firewall requires manually filling out some forms.

QoS support doesn’t provide much management flexibility. You can view online a data-dump system log, but Xincom provides room to configure three separate syslog servers to handle the parsing for you.

WAN status and traffic totals are available on several screens, but updates requires clicking a button.

For the full report, go to https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/0913rev.html