DHCP stallsThursday, February 10, 2005
I upgraded my home net with several pieces of Netgear hardware, including the FR114P router, the WG102 Wifi Access Point, and the FS108P, an 8-port switch with 4 Power Over Ethernet (POE) ports. The AP and the POE switch have been excellent choices. Not so with the router. Although it has features you don't find in a lot of consumer routers, like stateful packet inspection (SPI), logging, and email alerts, it just kept dropping connections to my home PCs for no apparent reason that I could find, and no support from Netgear. The DHCP server would seem to die, and all my home PCs would then lose their IPs and revert to private IPs (169.254.x.x). At that point my only recourse was to restart the router. After three weeks of this nonsense, I said to he** with it. I'm sending it back. The router I'm interested in now is the SMC Barricade Plus SMCBR14VPN.
Supports L2TP VPNFriday, January 21, 2005
The Linksys BEFSX41 is a faster and superior router to this Netgear box. I've found Linksys products in general to be more reliable than Netgear. BUT, I've be migrated to a new VPN client that utilizes IPsec L2TP. Although the Linksys does support IPsec pass thru, it does not allow L2TP. This NetGear router does. The print server is a nice plus, IF you want the router right next to the printer. I don't. So if you need L2TP, then this router is a good value. If you can spend more, I would suggest the SMC Baricade SMCBR18VPN. Its better quality and supports L2TP. But it lacks the print server and costs more.
similar to others -- good for a while, but ...Monday, August 30, 2004
I, like many other reviewers, found the router to work as advertised, mostly. like others, I never was able to get the printserver to work with my Lexmark 3200. But I mainly bought this item for its router/firewall capabilities.
as with others, the unit worked fine for nearly 18 months. now, I have to power cycle the thing nearly every time I boot my pc's in order to get an internet connection. and it randomly looses the internet connection with my cable modem. once the internet connection is lost I also loose LAN capability. it's really too bad, I really liked this product. for nearly a year and a half I didn't even think about it much. now it's a big headache. I gave it 2 stars since I liked it when it worked (4 stars) even though the print server didn't work, and now it rates 1 star -- so I took the average. for an $80-$100 product you wold think these things would last more than a year or so.
1 out of 2 people found the following review helpful:
worked OK for maybe 18 months then "pop" and smells badFriday, July 09, 2004
Never could hook up the printer, but it worked OK for a while until it started making erratic connection with the cable modem. Then "POP", a bad smell, and I'm out $100!
Serial FR14A278A011564
2 out of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Good featureset, but reliability and performance concerns.Wednesday, June 16, 2004
I've owned two of these routers now -- my first one died after about a year and I replaced it with the same model because I was fairly happy with it and it worked.
Configuration is easy and yet powerful. Pretty much all of the features I could want come built-in and work (make sure you get the latest firmware from the netgear site!)
In general the router has Just Worked for me -- I configured it, and left it alone. My DSL is up 24/7 and fairly heavily used, and I never ever have to touch the router.
On the other hand, I'm about to replace this router with the BEFSX41 -- my DSL line speed has recently been upped to 3mbits, and I'm now finding that the netgear box is the bottleneck on my network. Do a little bit of googling and you'll be able to find some comparative throughput tests (this router was by far the slowest)