Who makes a reliable home firewall/router?

October 25, 2005 2:57 PM

Who makes a reliable home firewall/router?

I have been through half a dozen Linksys BEFW11S4 and WRT54G wifi/router/firewall units in recent years and all have been uniformly unreliable. I have never had a unit that can stay online for more than a month without requiring a reboot.

Where can I find a reliable firewall/router? Wireless is optional - I could just hang the WRT54G off of a switch hanging off of the router.

I'm sort of tempted to build a linux based router with the Hacom 1U VIA server, but with memory and a hard drive I'll end up spending more than if I bought a Cisco PIX 501 from CDW.

Do I need the PIX, or is there something cheaper that is reliable?

posted by b1tr0t to computers & internet (17 comments total)

Take an old Pentium or P2 machine. Install SmoothWall. Done!

I've been using one in my home for months, without a reboot. Even does filter-based priority for incoming/outgoing traffic.
posted by Jairus at 3:02 PM on October 25, 2005

Seconding smoothwall - I've used it for at least a year, probably two. It's wonderful.
posted by odinsdream at 3:15 PM on October 25, 2005

I'd thoroughly recommend Draytek equipment. I've a 2600 that's been up for over 12 months with not a single problem. This was the recommendation of my ISP when our Netgear equipment kept failing and its worked out very well (not to mention less expensive than replacing the router every four months).
posted by grahamwell at 3:20 PM on October 25, 2005

Jairus, is the trafic shaping a 3.0 thing? I see no mention of it in 2.0 documentation.
posted by phearlez at 3:31 PM on October 25, 2005

I recomend the speedtouch series.

Picked up a 510 on ebay last year. Its been running for almost 12 months continuosly. Never had a problem with it.

A friend of mine uses them in his buisness and swears by them.
posted by gergtreble at 3:46 PM on October 25, 2005

phearlez, I use one of the many add-ons available for SW 2.0.
posted by Jairus at 4:10 PM on October 25, 2005

I'm pleased with my Soekris 4501 running m0n0wall.
posted by jackmakrl at 4:19 PM on October 25, 2005

I also recommend smoothwall. I bought an old dell for $40 at a local computer store and it works great! Rock solid.
posted by meta87 at 4:42 PM on October 25, 2005

I had a D-Link which didn't recognise my modem. I spent literally a month getting replacements of both and talking to phone support. Eventually they told me it was a known problem and the two were just incompatible for some obscure reason.

Stay away from D-Link.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 4:48 PM on October 25, 2005

It's fairly expensive (about $300 with a flash card) and a pain to get set up, but the Soekris 4801 with OpenBSD has been quite good for me. There's lots of online resources to help you through getting an image installed onto the CF.

The 4801 is a small, headless (no video), fanless PC that uses compact flash as a hard drive. No moving parts at all, and can take wide temperature variations. 266Mhz Pentium-class PC (an AMD Geode).

As jackmakri mentions, the 45XX series is also available. Slower CPU and less RAM, but cheaper.

The initial install is the hardest part... getting an OS onto a machine with no video and no floppy drive is a bit of a project. Once it's installed, the hardware seems exceedingly reliable (very few complaints on the mailing list). I've run both Linux 2.4 and OpenBSD 3.7. Zero unplanned downtime, after two years with Linux (occasional planned reboots for kernel updates) and three or four months with OpenBSD (no downtime whatsoever.)

If you want it really, REALLY bulletproof, that's how I'd do it. It's cheaper than a PIX, should be just as durable, and is a lot more configurable/customizable. The time investment, however, will be substantial.
posted by Malor at 4:48 PM on October 25, 2005

I had a Linksys BEFW11S4 and it worked great, absolutely no problems. Now I have a Netgear WGT624 and it's a piece of crap, highly non-recommended. (It overheats and stops working, plus stops working when X packets go through it and a firmware buffer overflows.)

I too would be interested in a no-hard-drive, not-a-PC, plug-in-and-it-works wireless 802.11g router that actually worked and was priced reasonably.
posted by jellicle at 6:22 PM on October 25, 2005

i really think that ALL home routers have real crappy quality control, being that I've had all sorts of problems with linksys (at my office) and no problems with the linksys (at my house) and no problems with the netgear (at my parents' house) although other people (you) report it.

All of the routers I've used have been always on to always on computers, and recently, the ones I've bought have been champs, both the Netgear B at home and the Linksys G i have at my warehouse.

I would say if you get a router and it's crapping out to try to return it, if the crapping out happens before the return policy expires. I guess routers are like memory and motherboards in that regard -- if you get one that works, it's fine, but if you get one of the ones that's crap, well, you're screwed and you're going to hate that brand forever (i actually surprised myself by buying a linksys after the debacle I had with it at my old work -- went through THREE routers, all of which overheated and reset, but this one has had no problems. Maybe routers have bad batches?)

no advice to add regarding firewalls, sorry, though I am experimenting with Devil Linux at my work and their standalone linux install which runs off of CD and grabs the config from a floppy or a USB drive.
posted by fishfucker at 7:26 PM on October 25, 2005

Netgear equipment is generally considered a step up from Linksys / D-Link / etc and my experience has matched that. You pay a slight premium for Netgear compared to the others, about 10-20% more. I have an FM114P that has Just Worked for years.
posted by intermod at 8:09 PM on October 25, 2005

I have had mixed experiences with Netgear products. The blue metal hubs and switches have been great in my experience. The silver plastic routers and access points have been not-so-great. I'm using one now, and it works fine most of the time, but under heavy use (P2P applications mostly, they can open a lot of simultaneous connections) it will fall down and require a reboot.
posted by hashashin at 10:28 PM on October 25, 2005

The Pix 501 hammers nails all day long. The only caveat is they are sold w/ maximum number of "users" which is really the number of active NAT translations. I've found an office of 15 people can bump into a 50 user limit. The workaround is to lower the xlate timeouts from the (very generous) defaults. The only other thing is the 501 uses a wall-wart power supply & DC jack. Anything without physical retention devices on the cables is not serious-class hardware, IMO.
posted by Triode at 10:41 PM on October 25, 2005

I've actually had nothing but good luck with my off-the-shelf Microsoft MN-500. It's been running continuously for about a year and a half (which has got to be some kind of record for an MS product) and actually solved some PPPoE problems my old Linksys kept causing with SBC.

The downside: the version I have is 802.11b only, and the security and DHCP options seem a little skimpy, and the antenna is a single fixed dipole (instead of the nice removeable diversity antennas Linksys has now) but when I needed a solid, easy-to-configure option for my ex-GF, this was it.
posted by jwadhams at 9:02 AM on October 26, 2005

I used a Microsoft access point (one that supported 11g though) for awhile. I ended up giving it to my mother. My general impression was that it was rather brain-damaged. It wasn't very flexible. And it didn't seem to have very good range/power.

If you don't really know what you're doing, and if you're using it as an all in one firewall/router/wireless access point, it's an acceptable solution. Personally, I much prefer the Linksys WRT54G (and GS)... Linux-based, very configurable, and has multiple replacement open-source firmware versions if you don't like the original. (which is more than fine for most uses, including mine.)

Avoid the Sveasoft firmware, though. That guy is rather crooked. He does provide good support for your $20, but he's very unethical about his treatment of GPL software, and does absolutely outrageously slimy things to people he catches copying 'his' firmware. (99% of which was, of course, written by other people.) I suggest using the DD-WRT version instead, if you need more features than the basic Linksys firmware provides.
posted by Malor at 5:54 AM on October 27, 2005 [1 favorite has favorites]