YeOldeStonecat
10-16-05, 01:36 PM
I used to hate them years ago....after working up close with a couple recently, well, I'll say they sure are an odd beast.
Most of us who have worked with the various home market routers out there, we're familiar with the usual Linksys/DLink/Belkin/Netgear setups, all pretty much similar to each other as far as the firmware workings/features go, if you're worked on one...you can pretty much work blindfolded on any of the others.
But these 2Wire units...wow, it's like they evolved from another planet, just a totally different animal. I've had time recently to really dig into one...it's quite a mixed bag of features once you dig around in there. A pretty in depth diagnostic area, even has real time status/throughput graphs like little Cisco PIX501s. Yet on the other hand...(at least the three models I've been farting around with for the past month)...for wireless security, they don't even support MAC filtering.
I'm not fond of the port forwarding methods, how on the surface it ties it in with the NetBIOS name of the computers (which makes you work for a few more seconds if you're computer has changed IP addresses and is still ghosted in the active clients table several times).
Wireless has not proven to be too stable for Centrino chipsets, nor strong in signals (range).
Most of us who have worked with the various home market routers out there, we're familiar with the usual Linksys/DLink/Belkin/Netgear setups, all pretty much similar to each other as far as the firmware workings/features go, if you're worked on one...you can pretty much work blindfolded on any of the others.
But these 2Wire units...wow, it's like they evolved from another planet, just a totally different animal. I've had time recently to really dig into one...it's quite a mixed bag of features once you dig around in there. A pretty in depth diagnostic area, even has real time status/throughput graphs like little Cisco PIX501s. Yet on the other hand...(at least the three models I've been farting around with for the past month)...for wireless security, they don't even support MAC filtering.
I'm not fond of the port forwarding methods, how on the surface it ties it in with the NetBIOS name of the computers (which makes you work for a few more seconds if you're computer has changed IP addresses and is still ghosted in the active clients table several times).
Wireless has not proven to be too stable for Centrino chipsets, nor strong in signals (range).