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Netgear MR814 802 11b Wireless 4-Port Cable DSL Ro The following report compares gadgets using the SERCount Rating (base on the result count from the search engine). |
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POPULAR HAT - 2006-02-13 11:31:00 | © Copyright 2004 - www.hat.net () | sitemap | top |
It has 1 x 10Mb/s WAN port, 4 x 100Mb/s Ethernet wired ports, as well as 11Mb/s 802.b11 wireless access. It makes an excellent replacement for my Linksys since it provides much of its functionality with wireless access added. It can be configured using a browser and it has one of the best configuration interfaces I've seen. The following comments related to the latest version of the firmware: 4.09.
It has a configurable firewall that supports port forwarding and can be set to block specific ports to selected internal IP addresses. All blocking can be scheduled to operate only at specific times. It can also block specific websites, a feature I don't have any use for. It cannot, however, block specific MAC addresses, which is an important feature if you are using DHCP. Even if you are not, static IP address can be easily changed by users on the network. Therefore, in my opinion, MAC blocking is a must for a future version of the firmware.
On the wireless side it supports up to 128-bit encryption as well as MAC filtering. It does not however allow you to disable wireless operation. For me, this is another important omission in the current firmware. Being able to schedule wireless operation times would be a nice security enhancement. Why have it run all night when you are sleeping, or during the day when you are at work?
I am hopeful that in the future the firmware will evolve to provide more useful features and perhaps drop some of the less useful ones. If it were to gain all of the functionality of my Linksys I would be extremely happy. As a minumum I believe that it should allow MAC blocking and it should allow wireless operation to be disabled/scheduled. Since this is a relatively new model there's a good chance that this will happen, especially given Netgear's excellent past record in home networking devices.