Netgear FVS338 ProSafe VPN Firewall 50 | List Price: $213.99
Discount Price: Too low to display
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Brand: Netgear
Binding: Electronics
Release Date: 2005-04-25
Warranty: NETGEAR lifetime warranty
Features: - Initiates up to 50 hardware accelerated AES VPN tunnels using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
- Supports NETGEAR's ProSafe Network Management Software NMS100 or any SNMP-based management software
- Optimized for use with NETGEAR ProSafe VPN Client Software VPN01L or VPN05L
- Dial Back-up for auto fail-over functionality
- 8 auto-sensing, Auto Uplink™ 10/100 Mbps switched LAN ports for office environment up to 253 users
Great unit for the price. [Posted on 2008-02-11]
I've had one of these units for just about a year and haven't had any issues with it whatsoever. I connect to it through the client every single day and never had any issues. I bought it for my FIOS Connection which is a synchronous 20Mb/Sec and I expect will go faster soon. This is why I chose this unit with a 90Mb transfer speed but tests out at about 60Mb which is still great for its price point.
On the con side - They have has some issues with previous firmware versions. The latest 2.x seems to be the best although I haven't heard of many issues with 3.x either.
The manual is a bit lacking. When they went from version 1x firmware to 2.x they changed a lot including a wizard for setting up the VPN which is great but the documentation still seems to reflect the old firmware which will not work. The client settings are a little different otherwise you won't be able to get it to work.
I recently connected 2 sites together and I have to say it was a breeze to set up and has been very stable and great throughput. Since there isn't anything else in their price range I think that this is a great investment. Oh yeah lets not forget the lifetime warranty.
Not ProSafe! [Posted on 2008-04-05]
The FVS338 out of the box should work! This is important for professionals! Can not make a profit making multiple trips to customer location because of defective equipment. I don't beleive this product deserves the "ProSafe" label! and in reality is "Consumer Grade"!
Netgear FVS338 ProSafe VPN Firewall Review [Posted on 2008-04-25]
My home network consists of several computers, both wired and wireless, all connected to the Internet via Cable Internet service.
I recently upgraded my service to a 15 megabits/sec download rate (which should provide 1500 to 1800 KBytes/sec download).
My old router was a Netgear FVS318v3 with the latest firmware. With the FVS318, the best speeds I could get were about 500KBytes/sec download, or only about 1/3 of what I should have been getting.
Connecting directly to the cable modem, of course, yielded full, expected speeds.
So, I did some research and discovered that many firewalls and routers do not have the throughput ability to keep up with a cable modem!
In fact, my old FVS318v3 was rated rather poorly among other routers.
However, the FVS338 had a good throughput rating of 90 megabits per second which was more than fast enough to handle my cable modem.
So, I removed my old router, installed the FVS338 and turned everything on. The first thing I did was to log into the router and upload the newest firmware from Netgear's support website. That went effortlessly.
Now, to run the speed test. Fingers crossed. Click the mouse button.... WOW!!! Full speed finally!
My downloads went from an average of 500 KBytes/sec to 1700 KBytes/sec (this of course depends on the particular website - some connections will be slow because of reasons outside of your control).
Peer-to-peer (lan) transfer speeds run around 9400 KBytes/sec, which tells me that this router is handling all the PC can put out.
This router has another feature that may be useful to a few people. It has a serial port on it that can be connected to an external dialup telephone modem. No, not DSL but that old, slow horrible "56K" thing. It's designed as a "fallback" to give you Internet connectivity if the main broadband cable modem goes down. It will be slow, but better than nothing.
Of course, to use this feature you need an external dialup modem and a dialup Internet Service Provider which is an extra cost that you will probably never need. Therefore, the serial port "fallback" feature is virtually worthless.
The only downside to this router is that the user needs some basic networking experience. A novice will be horrified by screen after screen of options and settings which can be configured.
The good news is, for most users the factory default settings don't need to be changed. There are things one may wish to set (such as what time zone you are in), but the router WILL work "out of the box" if you're afraid of complicated settings.
Unfortunately, I do not need or use one of the features of the FVS338 (the Virtual Private Networking - or VPN), so I can't comment on how it works.
In summary, if you need a firewall router that is FAST and can handle almost anything you throw at is, the FVS338 is for you. If you want a simple router that will work out of the box, the FVS338 is for you. If you are an IT expert and know how to set everything, the FVS338 is for you. The FVS338 is a little bit more expensive than other firewall routers, but it is packaged in a sturdy METAL box, it comes with Netgear's VPN client software (1 user license) and, of course, it's FAST.
So, all in all, the FVS338 is, in my opinion, a good product worth the price.
Excellent Product... but read on [Posted on 2008-04-28]
This is truly a great product.
It makes the configuration of a network (with inbound services) easy to perform. Yes, I gave it only four stars. It should be a five star product. There is one drawback and most will probably never run into it. Hopefully NetGear well address in their firmware making it a five star product:
If your default gateway IP address is NOT in the same subnet as your IP address, the FVS338 is not usable.
WAN IP: 70.225.xxx.xxx
Subnet: 255.255.255.248
Gateway IP: 68.250.xxx.xxx
Note the first octet of the IP addresses. To get around this, I placed the FVS338 behind an entry-level residential gateway (that does not seem to care) and configured the FVS338 this way:
IP Address: 192.168.246.2
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.246.1
Everything is fine, but I have the additional appliance and its latency delay in my network. I have opened problems with NetGear Tech Support, they also agree it is a problem, but so far I have not received a resolution.
I have the exact same configuration running on a Cisco 506E (PIX) that works fine. I have configured other routers and firewalls and this is the only one I have found so far that has this problem.
Like I said earlier, this may not be a problem for you. Check first. If you are using this behind a cable or DSL modem, you should be fine.
I have others that work great because their default gateway IP addresses are in the same subnet as the assigned IP address.
After all is said and done, I really like this product and NetGear has good Technical Support and I still recommend it. Notice I got around the problem instead of simply pulling it.
Enjoy: 2008/04/28
Excellent VPN [Posted on 2008-06-21]
I've got these units scatter all over the place with standard and agressive tunnels. Rock solid. If you thinking about a router with reliable VPN this is the one.
BTW, Forget the Netgear FVS 318 any verisions 1 and 2, they are crap. Have replace every one in my customer's sites. You can use them for a nice door stop though.
ALso, another piece of crap is the Linksys RVS4000. Even with the Firmware update, the Agressive VPN failed to work, and the units buffer would overload during normal use every few days requiring a hard reboot.
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