Tim Writer wrote:

James Knott <james.knott-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> writes:

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Terry Tanski wrote:

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Hi all, Anyone have any comments on the SMC Cable/DSL 4port router (SMC7004VBR)? How does it compare to the DLINK (604) or the LinkSys (SR41)? Does it have half-decent firewall capabilities?

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Terry

I have the wireless version of that. It seems to be OK. What capabilities were you looking for?

Well, I worked on the wireless version for a while and was not at all impressed. The firewalling capabilities are only applicable to the Internet connection, i.e. you cannot firewall your wireless LAN from your traditional LAN. You can use MAC based ACLs to prevent wireless users from going out to the Internet but you can't stop them from accessing your wired LAN. You can also restrict wireless traffic but you can't implement a deny by default policy, i.e. you cannot deny everything except the few services you want to allow, you can only deny specific services.

The bottom line: as long as you're not using wireless and you're using NAT, it will give you a basic level of protection simply due to the use of private IPs with NAT. IOW, it's okay for a simple home setting but I wouldn't use it in a business setting.

Back when those routers first came out SMC was really the only one on the market and thus I sold a number of them. A -lot- of them later failed. I switched to using Linksys (now Cisco) and I haven't had a single failure yet. Madison -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml