Easy Enough, Powerful Enough
Written: May 21 '03
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Pros: Dirt simple to set up, easy to configure for DMZ/passthrough needs, high-level encryption
Cons: Web interface seems a bit slow and clunky to respond
The Bottom Line: If you're looking for an 802.11 router, this one will do the trick.
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| caradoc's Full Review: D-link AirPlus™ DI-614+ Wireless Router |
After my bad experience with the SMC7004AWBR Wireless Router/Firewall, I started shopping around for a company with a better reputation...
I settled on the D-Link DI-614+ after looking through a lot of reports on various websites, and reading a lot of complaints in various Usenet newsgroups.
It's a basic four port router/firewall that includes 802.11b with D-Link's proprietary "AirPlus" protocol that allows wireless speeds of up to 22Mbps.
When they say it's a four port device, they mean that you have four ports to connect equipment. There's an extra "WAN-only" port to connect to your cable or DSL modem - you really have four available ports for your equipment, and not the regular "plug-in-the-DSL-modem-and-three-devices" four ports that you see on certain other manufacturers' devices.
Since I have four static IP addresses available for my little network here, I've plugged a four port hub into my DSL modem, then one of those ports leads to the DI-614+, and all of the "private" machines sit behind it, while my webserver, mailserver, and other machines sit on the "open" hub without being firewalled.
Setting up the DI-614+ is easy - connect the WAN port to your DSL or cable modem with the one included Cat5 cable, then connect one machine to one of the LAN ports. Make sure the machine is configured to use an address in the 192.168.0.2-254 range, using 192.168.0.1 as its default router, or just set your machine to use the DHCP automatic addressing. There's an appendix in the QuickStart manual that explains how to do this on Windows or on a Mac.
Open a web browser on the machine and point it to http://192.168.0.1, and it'll ask for the admin login and password (also nicely placed in the QuickStart manual).
Once you've logged in, the Setup Wizard will walk you through configuring the DI-614+ to work with your network. It even gets you to set a new admin password for the firewall, since the original password is actually blank.
The DI-614+ has its own logging facilities, so you'll want to make sure your time zone is configured correctly, then make sure you know whether you need to set the WAN address to be dynamic (most common) or static (less common) or if the router should use PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet).
The QuickStart manual even reminds you to remove PPPoE from your machines before trying to connect them to the router, since it won't pass PPPoE through the firewall.
At the end of the Setup Wizard, you'll be allowed to choose the level of wireless encryption to be used. I'm on a 384K SDSL line, and I can't tell the difference in throughput from zero encryption to 256-bit encryption - my link is so slow that I don't think it makes any difference. If I were accessing a local-area network, using 100Base-T on the wired side and 22Mbps for the wireless, I might be able to tell when the encryption slows things down.
After configuring the DI-614+, you might have to head back to the store for some additional Cat5 cables - it only comes with one. Fortunately, I've got this spool of Cat5 here, a crimper, and a box of RJ-45 plugs, so I didn't need to go buy anything.
Beyond the basic setup, the DI-614+ has some nice features. It can be configured to automatically e-mail log entries to an address of your choice - this allows you to do things like participate in the http://www.dshield.org effort to collate and correlate "attack" characteristics across the internet. If you're handy with scripting, you can even set it up to e-mail the log to your server, then parse the log for "suspicious" activity on your own.
If you need to open specific ports on your network to machines behind the firewall, the DI-614+ can do that, too. Just specify which external port is going to get forwarded inside the network, and which address it'll be forwarded to. For example, some IRC servers require a response from an ident daemon, or identd, before they'll allow a connection. I just have the identd port forwarded to my internal box, and all is well. I've also managed to allow iTunes to share usic outside my network (but only to people who have my iTunes account password!)
When I first got the DI-614+, I connected to D-Link's website to download their latest firmware package. Very few "firewalls" don't get regular updates to their firmware, as attack patterns and exploits change too quickly to trust old software. When I got the new firmware, I noticed that the DI-614+ was no longer automatically updating its time settings using NTP. I called them up, and within minutes they'd walked me through a specific sequence to clear the NTP settings and reset them. Good service. Far better than I got from SMC...
Overall, I've been more than pleased with the performance of the DI-614+. It's never needed a hardware restart like the SMC7004AWBR did, and it's currently supporting four internal wired machines, one wireless, and letting them talk to three other machines on my "external" network without any problems at all.
One other thing that I've noticed about the DI-614+ is that it supports passthrough for multiple IPSEC sessions. With the SMC7004AWBR, I wasn't able to establish more than one VPN session at a time, while the DI-614+ is happy to let me open two or more at a time.
The web interface is relatively easy to use, but it seems to have had some things installed as "afterthoughts". The site map isn't well laid out, and it's not always obvious which "tab" you need to get to to change a particular setting. It also seems to take a bit to load the webpages. I'll accept those as drawbacks, though, since it works so darned well in its role as a firewall/router.
The antennas on the DI-614+ are removable, so you can plug in an external high-gain antenna if you want. I may do this just so I can use my laptop down the street at the park while I'm with the dogs!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 89
Driver Availability: Windows, Linux, and Mac
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Epinions.com ID:
caradoc
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 - Top 500 |
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Member: John Groseclose
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
Reviews written: 182
Trusted by: 133 members
About Me:
System admin, technology addict, knife thrower, and dog "caregiver."
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