Switch goes up; Switch goes down (Netgear FM114P Cable/DSL ProSafe 802.11b Wireless Firewall)

Member Name: LegendaryMrDude

Product:	Netgear FM114P Cable/DSL ProSafe 802.11b Wireless Firewall
Date:	14/12/04 (827 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Construction, Software, Support

Disadvantages: Reliability, Reliability, Reliability

It may sound corny, but Broadband has changed the face of home computing. For one thing it's had a huge impact on the sales of home-office grade network equipment. Add to this the fact that wireless network finally came of age, and vendors like Belkin, NetGear and LinkSys are laughing all the way to the bank.

I will hold up my hand at this point and admit to the fact that I did my bit to line the coffers of NetGear (obviously). With an increasing tendency towards home-working, I wanted the flexibility of wireless access to my broadband internet conenction, but I wanted it to be secure. I also wanted the flexibility of a built-in switch for connecting the various other computers in my house together. And of course it had to support my company VPN solution. If it could offer the added benefit of acting as a print-server then I'd be as happy as the proverbial pig.

The clumsily titled NetGear FM114P met all of my requirements and had the added benefit of being made by a brand that I trusted, so I bought one (for £150).

It's a compact little unit, about the size of a medium-weight paperback. The box istelf is a lovely shade of "NetGear Blue" and made of metal so has a solid feel to it's construction. The front panel is home to all of the various LEDs that flash and flicker during the various stages of it's operation, indicating swicth port activity, WAN activity, print-server activity and wireless activity. The switch ports all have an additional LED to indicate whether they are operating at 10 or 100MBps. Then there's the amber "test" LED and the ubiquitous power LED. All-in all, it's a competent but unexciting front-panel.

The sides are coverd by chunky grilles for ventilation and boy does it need it. This thing runs hot, particularly with all 4 switch ports operating at 100Mbps. The back-panel is fairly run of the mill. The WiFi anetnna is easily positionable, a Parallel port provides the home for the printer, a reset button for restoring factory defaults, an uplink/downlink switch allows cascading of switches/hubs from the 4th LAN port. The ethernet Internet/WAN port (so it's no use with a native xDSL line) is clearly labelled and closely followed by the DC power socket. The power supply itself is a chunky plug-based version so takes up a bit of room and requires careful positioning on the extension lead. The unit also has screw-mount holes on the back which allow it to be fixed to a wall (at any of 3, 90degree different, angles). So physically, it's compact, relatively rugged and hot to the touch... not totally unlike yours truly ;-)

It's the software that tends to differentiate these kinds of devices from one another and the NetGear holds up well on that front. The user interface is web based, like most others but it is far more logically laid out than a number of others that I have seen (Belkin in particular). Rather than go over every intimate detail here, I will stick to the points that it either does well, badly or uniquely.

Configuration out of the box is a doddle. Most of it is auto-config with the exception of the WiFi settings which require some user input (like SSID name). There is support for WEP (but no WPA), No SSID-broadcast and MAC address filtering. The Internet interface can support both authenticated and unauthenticated connections, as well as static & dynamic address assignments. A DHCP server is included, in which you can describe the range from which IP addresses should be allocated. There is also basic support for some rudimentary routing protocols although I can't see too many situations where this would be useful.

So what does it do well/ differently? Top of my list is actually the support for Dynamic DNS providers. If, like me, your broadband provider assigns you a dynamic IP address, having Dynamic DNS support in your router means that you can use a single DNS name that will always resolve to whatever IP address your ISP happens to have assigned you. Particularly handy if you need access back into your machine(s) at home. And this is where it comes in useful having a firewall function that can allow controlled access in to your home computing environment.

While there is no support for authentication at the firewall itself, you can restrict inbound traffic to combinations of individual network services, source and destination IP addresses. There is even support for time-based rules, so that you can have different profiles active at different times of the day. All of this is capable of being logged, along with the general hacking attacks that will come your way through virtue of being connected to the Internet. The firewall feature will also drop some of the mroe common Denial of Service attacks. Log alerts can even be emailed to you on a scheduled basis shold you be that interested. As well as defining individual rules for inbound (and outbound) services, you can also nominate a single internal server as a "DMZ" server. From a security perspective this is a nightmare and is best avoided as it effectively means all connections from the Internet to this one server are permitted, but the router itself doesn't allow you to seggregate it from the other internal machines. I suspect this was a feature requested by marketing simply because another vendor had it on their product sheet!

One of the other neat features, particularly if you have children, is the blocking of websites based on words in the URL. Be they part of the site name of a word within the directory or page structure, the Netgear can block the pages and deliver a default error message informing the user that their access request has been blocked. Again, all of this can be logged and bundled up in part of the scheduled email report should you want.

Other features include VPN passthrough support which is extremely useful for any corporate remote-workers and UPNP support (which is of dubious value and a bit of a securtiy concern). Router upgrades and config backups are also available through the web interface although past experience can only leave me recommending that you upgrade with utmost caution. If your router is doing everything you need it to, leave well alone. The upgrade process has killed two of these boxes for me (so it's useful that I was able to back the configs up before hand!).

I never actually made use of the print server functionality as I had a USB printer and shared it out over Windows native, although this did have the disadvantage of meaning that the PC with the printer attached had to be turned on all the time. In theory, the print server is extremely useful, but there are other devices available these days that will allow you to share a USB printer on a wireless network with next to no fuss. Combine one of these with a cheaper wireless broadband router and the netgear is a less attractive option.

Those are the upsides and, all things considered it sounds a great piece of kit, but what are the down-sides?

Reliability is my biggest gripe. In three years, I have had to have my device replaced three times by Netgear, for a total of 4 units(including the original)! The problems seem to relate to heat, but problems have always occurred after either a complete failure of the switching engine or a software upgrade that didn't take, leaving a box with scrambled brains. That's not to take anything away from the NetGear support organisation, who each time have talked me through all of the options (usually requiring over an hour on the phone!), before coming to the conclusion that the box is dead and in need of replacement. Each time, the replacement unit has been received in good time, but each time it has cost me £35 in return pistage to send the dead unit back to base... 3 times over and I'd surpassed the cost of a replacement box from another vendor. So when my latest unit inevitably failed I decided to throw it and buy in to a cheaper (and hopefully more reliable) option (opinion to follow).

In summary then, the Netgear is a good looking, solidly built piece of kit with some excellent software features. It has a great warranty and some fine support but it's completely let down by it's reliability. A power cut (on surge proteted sockets) is enough to ruin it's config, software uploads are hit and miss affairs and the whole thing becomes unstable in the summer heat. Hardly a solution to sell to a small office / home user where the closest thing to an air-conditioned datacentre is the fridge! If you want my advice, avoid the FM114P and go for something a lot cheaper. You will save money in the long run as all it takes is two return-to-base exchanges and you're out of pocket on a whole new replacement device from another manufacturer.

[Originally posted by me on Ciao.co.uk in December 2004]

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