I have been considering a couple of upgrades for my home network. First, I'd like to move the firewall and router duties off of a PC and onto a dedicated router (less power, less heat, less noise, and less cost). And secondly I would like to be able to use my laptop without having to plug into the network. The network equipment companies are now starting to deliver 802.11g devices, which have a maximum possible throughput of 54Mbps (as compared to 11Mbps for the older 802.11b standard). One downside, though, is that 802.11g is still a draft standard and is not yet finalized. However, most of the devices that I am considering have upgradeable firmware that will allow them to be upgraded should the standard change by the time it is finalized.
One of the great things about having the Internet as a resource is that companies can make available more information than they could in the past, when they would have to rely on salespeople (who are mostly clueless about this stuff) and glossy brochures (which often weren't worth the paper they're printed on). Getting answers to technical questions could be difficult (even if the company has a technical presales group). In my case, one of the things that I need is the ability to forward SSH requests through the firewall to my Linux system. I'm considering the Linksys WRT54G, which is a wireless access point with a router/firewall (and 4 wired 10/100 Ethernet ports). Linksys actually provides the manuals for almost all of their devices on their site, which made answering my question much simpler. I downloaded the manual and was able to determine that the router does support port forwarding and as a bonus it can also directly update the DynDNS.org database with the latest IP address (which was a pleasant surprise and appears to be a new feature they've added since the last time I looked at their routers).
This kind of information availability is one of the things that has kept me using their products for all of my home networking for the past 5 years. I got started with them because of their LNE100TX PCI cards, which were inexpensive and easy to use, and it's grown from there. So, when I finally decide to pull the trigger on this network upgrade, it'll probably be with the Linksys equipment.
Posted by Aubrey at February 23, 2003 01:49 PMAubrey,
We have the Linksys Etherfast. It is WONDERFUL. We had dealt for years with plugging up the software firewall and setting aside a seperate computer to share the Internet connection. As soon as we got the Linksys all our troubles disappeared. I no longer had to spend the daily minutes blocking IPs that were trying to hack into our network.
We plugged into it a wireless hub (US Robotics), so that everyone in the house uses a wireless connection (except me). That sure came in handy when we moved and I didn't have to lay cable to every room in the house.
If you aren't familiar with it, give Shields Up a whirl to test your security: https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2
With our current configuration we test in stealth mode on all our ports and connections.
When my husband's son and ex-wife needed a shared device, we bought the Microsoft version (because it was on sale). What a nightmare! I couldn't get that thing to work for two days. After I did get it to work, it didn't work reliably. I eventually got disgusted with it and trashed it for a US Robotics bundle that was available at Costco. What a relief that was. Their connection is now stable, secure, and the installation was (as it should be) painless.
I would recommend highly the Linksys Etherfast.
Posted by: Mrs. du Toit at February 23, 2003 02:21 PMI'm currently using a Linux-based firewall and the last test I did on it was pretty good. Unfortunately, I can't be completely stealthy because of leaving open the SSH port. Anyway, the more I think about it, the more tempting it is to get an appliance that will handle all the firewall/routing stuff.
Posted by: Aubrey Turner at February 23, 2003 04:16 PM