From The Naked PC issue #5.08...

Hardware for Virtual Private Networks

by T.J. Lee and John Heffron
April 11, 2002

I've received a lot of feedback from my previous article on VPNs. Since the subject was of such interest I thought I'd cover a SOHO router that came to my attention that supports a virtual private network. To accomplish this end I've enlisted the help of one of the technology specialists I work with at McMillan Consulting, John Heffron. I gave John the Nexland ISB Pro800turbo device and let him play with it a bit.

The Pro800turbo is an Internet sharing and firewall router device suitable for small office, home office (SOHO) use that supports VPNs and has the somewhat unique ability to accept two broadband connections at the same time. If you had a critical need to always be connected to the Internet you could hook up both a DSL line and a cable modem connection to the Pro800turbo and if one connection failed the traffic would roll over to the other connection. The Pro800turbo also performs load balancing when both connections are working. What's more you can have an analog or ISDN dialup connection to the device's serial port initiate a connection, automatically providing for a third layer of connection redundancy.

The device has a metal casing (as opposed to plastic like you see on devices from LinkSys or NetGear), which certainly gives it an impression of sturdiness. It allows for eight LAN ports (in addition to the two broadband ports) and provides firewall, DHCP, and ISP sharing services. It will clone a MAC address to spoof a broadband device like a cable modem into thinking the router is the NIC card of a particular PC. There is a Web interface which makes configuration easy, with help buttons liberally sprinkled on each configuration page. It's easy to set up port forwarding and you can back up your configuration settings.

Initial setup of the Pro800turbo was pretty straightforward, and the manual provided was very helpful. John made a Web site available through the device and had remote control of his desktop configured in just under 15 minutes. We ran multiple broadband connections through the router and when we pulled the cable connection out of WAN 1 the WAN 2 connection picked up the load immediately without interrupting our test download.

Resetting some hardware configuration settings, however, was tricky and required you to power the router up with DIP switches in one state, and then change the setting within a certain number of seconds from boot. Playing with this took 10 minutes to get the timing right and there was no indication of when the router was going to reboot to save changes.

There is no logging facility to show you inbound and outbound traffic, which is a feature we both would have liked to see (although third party software to handle this function is suggested in the documentation).

The VPN feature worked but there was no VPN client offered for Windows XP with the Pro800turbo. Again, third party software was the solution (Symantec has a client that works). Remote access is restricted to a range of IP addresses, which is either a nice security feature or a colossal pain in the neck depending on your specific needs.

Overall the Pro800turbo appears to very reliable, never dropping a connection. Despite its impressive feature set, at $399.99 list it's a bit on the pricey side for a SOHO class router. For that money you're getting into the Cisco baby-PIX range and true business class firewalls.

http://www.TheNakedPC.com/t/508/tr.cgi?jim1

You can reach T.J. Lee regarding this article at:
mailto:tj_lee@TheNakedPC.com

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