wired routers

This product is doing everything I bought it to do, at a very resaonable price. It allows multiple systems to share an ISP broadband connection. It also acts as a firewall (attacks to the home PC have stopped according to NetIce Defender). Please note, that I am only using this product as a gateway and not a router!

Today, I share my ISP connection between home PC and work laptop computers {via a VPN tunneling product). I expect to have additional home computers in the future. I am confident that I'll be able to safely (securely) share printers and files between them.

I particularly liked BEFSR81's ability to configure the WAN port hardware address. This allowed using the home PC hardware address. If needed, this allows easy trouble shooting. I can remove easily remove the Linksys router and test the ISP connection with the home PC. If you do this, I recommend providing the original Linksys hardware address to the ISP in case the programming is removed. I did (no sense jeopardizing your relationship with ISP)!

The documentation was good, except around setting the hardware address. It is clear what to do to the Linksys router, but completely lacking in information about how to determine your computer's hardware address. For MicroSoft operating systems use either winipcfg for Win98 and ipconfig for NT or Win2000.

My last learning of interest, concerns accessing the router after you connect with the ISP. My ISP configured a proxy script on the home PC. I wasn't able to access router until I disabled the script (easily checked on/off in Tools/Internet Connection/LAN settings). This demonstrates the security functionality! The router's LAN address is on your private network. The Linksys router is a firewall between it and the public network containing the proxy server.

Prior to purchasing this Linksys product 2 weeks ago, I was very satisfied with Linksys and owned a number of other Linksys products, including a KVM switch, wireless access point, wireless LAN card, and 1-port Cable/DSL router.

I bought this product because I wanted an 8-port switch. The fact that they had a combo DSL/Cable rouer + 8 port switch convinced me to buy this product since I could save space and power, and I would also be able to use my 1-port router for other stuff like creating a separate subnet.

However, I had problems with this product when I replaced my 1-port Cable/DSL router with this one. I had to reset it (unplug and re-plugged in) multiple times per day. Finally I gave up and went back to using my 1-port DSL/Cable just starting using this thing as an 8-port switch. Since then, I haven't had any problems with this product.

From reading other reviews, this doesn't seem like an isolated issue. Linksys looks to have a defective product, and there are no firmware updates available (yet) on their website.

Apparently some have success with this unit and some don't. I bought the V3 unit and put the 2.50.2 firmware on it and 50k is the best download speed I can get. Spent time on the phone with LinkSys and they said take it back. Weird thing is, my upload speed is over 200k, about what it should be.