I back in the world of Ciao after a years break. Maybe this time I will stick around a bit longer. A...
I back in the world of Ciao after a years break. Maybe this time I will stick around a bit longer. Anyway my reviews tend be based on my work ("computing") or my hobbies - travel, beer, rugby league, surfing and a bit geeky - "computing".
Member since:13.07.2001
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The following review is based on both my own personnel usage of the Netgear DG834G router and also as a tool in a business environment. Firstly let me tell you what is included within this device and then why I chose it for both environments.
This device is made up of the following – an ADSLMODEM, 4-port Switch, Wireless Access Point and Firewall. Bear this in mind when making a purchase – if you don’t want all of these facilities NetGear and other manufacturers make other products such as a model that does not include the ADSL MODEM.
From a business point of view we had to deploy Broadband access to around 100 remote users in different geographical locations. Because we ended up using a few different Broadband providers we wanted to provide a standard front-end device. Each different provider was offering to supply a different USB Modem device. However a word of caution with this approach. Because there is no need to use your ISP supplied MODEM you may potentially have problems if you require support from them at some point.
Secondly at some locations more than one person would want to connect via the Broadband at the same time. With the NetGear device up to 253 devices can be connected (although realistically you would unlikely want this to be the case).
Finally a number of users expressed an interest in using Wireless connections in there homes.
With these requirements in mind the NetGear product was a bit of a no brainer.
What you get/What you need
First what you get. The pack contains the router itself (with mounting brackets), power, filter, ADSL cable and one Ethernet network cable. Instructions supplied are brief but in truth that’s all that’s needed. Apart from what’s supplied you are going to need some method of connecting up your client computers – newer PC’s and laptop’s are likely to have either a built in network or wireless card but if not you are going to need one.
Getting Started
The router is managed via a web front end. By opening your web browser and going to the address of the router (http://192.168.0.1) you end up at the management console.
Basically if your client machine is ready there is no reason not to be up and running within 5 minutes. After being prompted for the console username and password you are met by a wizard. This is just a case of choosing your country and language and whether you would like the router to auto detect the connection type. Auto detection has only failed once for me and a retry sorted this out. The auto detections works out things such as the Encapsulation type – either PPP over Ethernet or ATM. At this point you are asked for the username and password provided by your ISP and asked to click the Apply button. Once done you are basically ready to go!
The Web Console
Just a quick mention on the console itself as this is where you configure pretty much everything. The console is broken up into 5 logical sections – Setup, Security, Maintenance, Advanced and Web Support. These show on the left hand side of the screen with extra options then displayed in the middle and comprehensive help on the right hand side. Overall well layed out and easy to follow.
Security
I will mention Wireless security separately and the following is the more general security you can set. Firstly you can block full web sites or sites with certain keywords. This can be set to work in a couple of different ways. You can choose to have this block across all times and all connecting computers or only at certain times of the day for instance. An extra option allows you to choose one computer (actually one IP address) that can connect to any blocked information. Backing this service up are logs and an e-mail service, which will let you know if someone has tried to connect to any blocked sites.
To protect you from hackers the device also includes a firewall and NAT (Network Address Translation). Obviously its beyond the scope of this review to give full details on the inner workings of firewalls but this includes protection from Denial of Service attacks (such as Ping of Death) and blocks unwanted traffic from the Internet.
As tight as a firewall is sometimes you do need to open up certain ports to allow things to work correctly. An example of this is for NetMeeting. Reading through support documentation I discovered I would need to open up 2 ports – 1503 (T.120) 1720 (H.323). To do this you have to tell the firewall through “Rules” what you would like to open up. For some reason port 1720 was listed but I had to create a manual entry for 1503. This was easily done however by creating a new service. Note that while I investigated this and worked this out myself a colleague who also uses this model of router at home called NetGear support and they remotely set this up for him. Once setup you can disable and enable these Rules as you need them (i.e. when you have finished using NetMeeting).
This device supports the 802.11g standard which means it can run at up to 54 Mbps.
The Wireless Settings allow you to configure a number of options. The first option you might want to change is to actually allow the router to act as a Wireless Access Point. By default this is switched on so if you aren’t going to be using Wireless it’s a good idea to switch it off it at this point. If you are going to be using Wireless the other settings are all security related from this point on. Firstly you can change the default SSID from the default ‘NETGEAR’ to one of your own. From a security point of view it’s a good idea to change this. You can also turn off the broadcasting of the SSID. Again from a security point of view there is no reason to leave this switched on as you can key your own SSID into any client machines. The next bit of security allows you to setup an access list of allowable machines to connect via Wireless. This is based on the MAC address of each network/wireless card that is going to connect. Each card has a unique MAC address. You can type this in manually or if the router can see any devices it lists them for you to choose. Again for security reasons there is no reason not to set this up. Your final options are to choose the type of encryption you want. The default is not to use any encryption but the other options are –
WEP (Wired Equivelant Privacy) – you can choose from either Automatic, Open System or Shared Key based on either 64 or 128 bit strength.. WPA-PSK (Wi-Fi Proteced Access Pre-Shared Key) WPA-802.1x
Although its beyond the scope of this review again you should really use some sort of encryption.
Maintenance
There are a number of options available from this menu including looking at the status of the router and diagnostics, which pretty much speak for themselves. Two that should be used however are the “Set Password” and “Router Upgrade” options.
The “Set Password” option allows you to change the master password to access the router via the web console. The default password is literally ‘password’ so it goes without saying you should change this straight away.
Another priority should be to check for a firmware upgrade for the router. I had a problem on a couple of routers in that the line would seemingly drop for no reason. I never found out why only a couple of routers behaved in this way but the firmware upgrade seemed to stop the problems straight away. The process for doing the upgrade is simple to follow and takes no more than a couple of minutes.
Advanced Settings
Pretty much speaks for itself and in truth most never needs to be changed.
One option that needs to be understood to a certain extent is “LAN IP Setup”. By default the IP address of the router itself is 192.168.0.1. The router also has a built in DHCP server which basically auto assigns addresses to any other machines on its network. This range is from 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.254. Again this can all be changed and from a security point of view if you know only a couple of machines are ever going to connect to the router there is probably no reason to have the pool this large.
Perhaps the most important option on here is “Remote Management”. By default this option is turned off but can be turned on with the click of a mouse. By turning this on the router can be managed via a web console from a remote location – such as by a NetGear support person.
Overall
The NetGear DG834G fitted the bill perfectly for what I wanted it to do. Despite a couple of problems (fixed with a firmware upgrade) I have no reason not give this product anything less than a perfect score.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Great review - understood enough to know that you considerered it excellent kit
Jol
Luckyfriend 31.03.2005 12:25
Good review but found it a bit mindblowing! Not a beginner when it comes to computing but this I found, was technical! Had to read it twice. Just in the market looking for the best router. Can you answer me a question? Can you still set up user accounts to access broadband when wireless?? There are 3 of us, including myself, who use broadband and I don't want them to be able to access my account. Plus I need parental block settings. Can you help??? Thanks BEV
mraouf101 24.11.2004 09:56
Great review, this netgear is perfect because i have a seperate dsl router and another wirless access point, so it is great to include them both in just one device.
Nov 1st, 2004
exceptional by (5%):
very helpful by (89%):
helpful by (5%):
