What router should I get?

pylonx

New Member
After a few hours of searching online from place to place I haven't really made much progress on finding a solution.

I work for a small Sporting Goods Retail Chain. Four Stores in all. We have been runing off fairly simple routers so far. Here in the past few days our D-Link DFL-700 has been acting up. I can no longer get into the web interface. So tomorrow morning I will be resetting it. But I am taking the problems it is having as a sign that it is going down hill.

I am looking for a Firewall router. We don't use any of the VPN functions but I wouldn't mind having them around for the future. I do like to lock down what people can do online. So I make use of the firewall as much as possible. I have been thinking about setting up a proxy server but so far the DFL-700 was working for what we needed.

But since I am looking for a replacement I might aswell see what we can improve upon. We have 35 computers in our main building that received the internet and routing through our current Router. I have been replacing our 10/100s with 10/100/1000s. The router doesn't really need that much as I can have a switch 6 inches away from it on the rack that will have that speed.

Our Net connection right now is DSL but we are moving to a better connection through Cable so we can also have store music on the same bill as our net connection.

In the past I haven't had great luck with Linksys but have done well with D-link. So, I wanted to keep D-link in our network with the NetDefend series DFLs or any of the NetDefends. But The only one I could find for sale was the DFL-210 for around $325.

I did a little more digging on other systems, such as, netgear and Linksys. Not finding exactly what I wanted from Netgear but Linksys had a system that has come very close.

Its a linksys RVS4000 at $124. It has some key things that stuck out for me. The firewall does IP, MAC and URL filtering. I use the URL filtering a lot. And will impliment the MAC and IP filtering much more in the future. Not to mention it is 10/100/1000.

I'm hoping some one out there has done their research and can give me some input. I mean, I'd love to just buy a Cisco router but I have to get things approved before I buy them.

Any Questions? Please ask.
And thanks for reading!
 
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I have been using Smoothwall www.smoothwall.org for several years running on an old Dell Precision 420 that I had lying around. It offers many more configuration options as well as additional mods than typical hardware firewall/routers. There is also the option of copying the configuration to a floppy so if and when it dies a new one can be configured very quickly.
 
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