|
I have had my prejudices about other brands like Netgear, SMC, Allied Telesyn, Belkin and 3Com but I am reconsidering these brands. Warranty is only 1 year. Actually, both died at about exactly the same: just a little over 2 years - two months apart. I replaced it and purchased the 3rd unit two months later for our brand new second location.
DLink has very nice products and a full product line. DLink and Linksys use nice cute (sexy) names to say the same thing in order to sell, focus on the technical specs and features. Nobody can convince me that this is coincidence.I moved away from Linksys because their SOHO equipment line forgot about the Small Office and focuses only in the Home Office and Home devices. Tempting.
On my 3rd unit I got an extended 2 year warranty but it died 1 month after the extended warranty expired. Shop smart use common sense. I have 3 gone bad in less than 2 years on average. The first one died shortly after 1 year of operation.
The IP address changed to its default value, as it should have, but the default user name and password do not work. On both units, the very first save seemed to work, but subsequent saves had troubles. After the upgrade, however, my password no longer worked. On the second unit, it never did work.I decided to update the firmware on one of the units, because several reviewers suggested that was useful.
Even after reading the poor reviews, I bought two of these because they had the set of features that I needed and I figured that D-Link would have worked the bugs out after a year in service.I was wrong. Now I am unable to log into the box, and its default network settings are useless to me.Unless you intend to use the default settings, or intend to change the settings just once, look elsewhere. So I decided to reset the unit to its default settings, using the reset button on the back. Both units had trouble simply storing port forwarding rules.
I followed the rules, and the upgrade seemed to complete successfully. The Netgear FVS318 seems to provide similar functionality. I would fill out the form and hit save, and the new information would be gone. On the first unit, the second save worked after several attempts.
Without this ability, the VPN's were unable to stay connected. It took 3 phone calls to Linksys to confirm this. We were very unsatisfied with this product. Without the ping the remote thinks the connection is not being used and shuts dowm. Do not follow Linksys's advise to replace the DI804HV with this router. Linksys claims this product replaces the discontinued DI804HV, but it is lacking programming features of the DI804HV. In setting up the VPN's between our locations, there was no way to add an IP address to ping our remote locations.
With the research I performed on the router prior to purchase, I expected it to perform this function. The one drawback to this device is, like most low-cost routers, GRE (Protocol 47) does not passthrough (as of Firmware 1.10), preventing PPTP connections to a server on the LAN-side of the router. (As a result, I gave the equipment a 4, instead of 5-star rating). As far as a router/gateway goes, the device performs properly with a good set of features, including logging and diagnostic features uncommon among other low-cost routers. The router's built in VPN server functions well with PPTP/L2TP, although authentication is a little slow if you are used to the speed of authentication on a Windows 2003 server.
My download and upload speeds still exceed what my cable company advertises. simple to set up, works as expected. Count me as a happy customer. I used this to replace an old D-Link 4 port. No problems whatsoever.
|
