FVS318 A Great Low Cost Firewall/VPN Solution

If you run a small office or a home office and need the kind of network capabilities corporate enterprises have, but can't afford the enterprise grade equipment, this product could be your solution.

What it Does...

The Netgear FVS318 functions as a Router, Firewall, VPN (Virtual Private Networking) Device, DHCP Server, and 8 Port Switch Device all in one.

As a router, the FVS318 offers small office environments the capability of sharing a high speed DSL or Cable internet service connection to a network of computers and network-enabled devices. Specifically the router offers NAT (Network Address Translation) service which allows you to use one internet (external) IP address to access the internet and translates it to a "dummy" (internal) IP address to which all your network computers can talk with and use to communicate over the internet.

As a firewall, the FVS318 protects you both as a "natural firewall" since your network uses dummy addresses protecting them from direct access from the outside, and as a "true firewall" performing Stateful Packet Inspection, and protecting your network from DoS (Denial of Service Attacks).

As a VPN solution, the FVS318 can support up to 8 VPN tunnels allowing you to have up to 8 different locations running encrypted connections into your network remotely.
Security is handled via 3DES encryption and the use of a preshared key.

As a DHCP Server, you can also let the FVS318 dynamically assign the dummy IP addresses to your computers simplifying network management. If you prefer static addressing inside, the DHCP Server functionality is easily turned off.

The unit includes a built in 8 port switch which allows you to connect up to 8 computers or network devices. If you need to tag on more systems just simply connect a switch off of one of the 8 ports.

My experience with the equipment...

To date I have installed 4 of these (2 talking to each other over VPN).

Physical installation is a snap for even the most novice user. Connect the ethernet cable from your cable modem or DSL modem to the port marked "Internet" and your computers or other devices to any of the 8 switch ports.

Configuration is also reasonably simple via a web-based interface. http://192.168.0.1/ by default.

Basic settings allow you to dynamically attain your public IP, set a static IP if you have one, and to enter user and password for PPPoE connections (commonly used with verizon DSL, covad, earthlink, etc.) All the other typical settings such as DNS servers are also easily controlled.

More advanced settings allow you to utilize content filtering (prevent your workers from surfing for porn, etc)Configure VPN services, review security logs, perform diagnostics, control DHCP services, setup port forwarding (punch holes for special servers/services [FTP, HTTP, etc])
and more.

Out of the four that I installed all came with the 1.0 revision of the firmware.

As soon as I hooked the first one I installed up to the internet connection it acted flaky initially, dropping connections. I quickly found out that a trip to netgear's website showed firmware revision 1.1 available for download.
ftp://downloads.netgear.com/files/netgear1/FVS318v1_1.zip

Unzip the file and then go into the web setup interface for the router. Under maintenance click upgrade and simply tell it where the file you unzipped is and it will do the rest.

After installing this firmware upgrade the product performed perfectly. On the subsequent installs I noted the same symptom out of the box for each, but solved the problem easily with the firmware upgrade.

(Note that recently I have seen the 1.2 version is available but I have not yet tried this one)

Despite the minor firmware issue out of the box (which you may not have as I installed these when they were first available) the product is amazing considering it sells for about $120-$150 depending on where you buy it. To give you a comparison an enterprise grade product that does all of these functions (plus some more advanced ones) runs about $1600-$2000 for starters.

As I mentioned before 2 of these were set up to communicate over VPN. I have successfully used the VPN functionality between the two, one running over DSL in MD the other over cable in NJ. Note that VPN capability requires that one location has a static IP. If your connecting multiple remote sites to a central office the static IP should be at your central office. This setup was also reasonably simple. If you want specific instructions see Netgear's document: FVS318 to FVS318 for IKE (Dynamic IP) This can be found on their website through the support section.

Overall the product is a great deal offering a real world solution for small companies that don't have a lot of money to invest in their network infrastructure.

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Note that if you go shopping for this product to look specifically for the FVS318 and NOT the FV318 which is an earlier product. For your information the chief differences (according to Netgear) between the two are:

FVS318 has:

No user limitations
Support for 8 VPN tunnels (FV318 has support for 5)
An improved user interface to get your network up and running quicker
One of the lowest prices-per-port of any comparable VPN product in the industry
A wider array of compatibility with other VPN products on the market