Home/SOHO "Firewall" Routers

[jseymour () linxnet com (Jim Seymour)]

Hi Wizzards,

We've recently put a secured mailserver outside the firewall to give
roaming (laptop-using) employees speedier access to their email from
outside the company facilities.  Where they have home broadband
connections, we'd like to have them install a router/switch (commonly
referred-to as a "broadband modem router") that does NAT and packet
filtering.  I've identified four likely candidates and am wondering
if anybody on the list has had any experiences with any of these
devices and would care to render an opinion.  The candidate products
are (so far):

    . LinkSys BEFSX41
    . D-Link DI-804HV
    . Netopia 3386-ENT
    . SMC 7004VBR

The most important characteristics would be, of course, how good are
their security records, degree of configurability (ingress/egress
packet filtering) and reliability (saw one complaint about one of
them that, when some of the advanced filtering stuff was activated,
it crashed regularly).  Also of interest are ease of interfacing with
a variety of residential broadband service types (DHCP, PPPoE),
performance (throughput), and any experiences with the manufacturer's
technical support department.

I've searched the web extensively, and haven't been able to find any
kind of comprehensive independent technical evaluations of any of
these products, or their predecessors.

Please email responses directly to me--I'll summarize to the list.

Thanks,
Jim
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