We've got a moderately extensive home network here in Lewis Center. Security has been provided by a SonicWall Pro firewall since my days at Granitar. At Granitar helped setup up interoffice VPN's using the SonicWall Pro and when they cut me loose, I got to keep the SonicWall I had here.
It's served us well. It has lots of nice features and has a relatively compact 1U rack mount form factor. But after upgrading to Mac OS 10.2, we started having a few compatibility problems. Kathleen uses Adobe GoLive to update a moderately large web site and it started getting errors when transferring lots of files over ftp. We did some troubleshooting and all indicators pointed to some weird incompatibility between Mac OS 10.2 and the SonicWall. So I submitted a trouble report to the SonicWall folks and was promptly informed that we didn't have a service contract and did not have the right to ask them questions. Harrumph!
Well, just last week I set up my sister with a shiny new firewall, the D-Link DI-604.They just needed a simple dedicated firewall/router and this one was cheap and looked like a good buy. It turned out to be a very impressive little box: built-in four port ethernet switch, slick web based configuration interface, NAT, DHCP, port mapping, etc. In fact, virtually all the features the SonicWall had (no built-in VPN is about all that is missing). And the little 0.44 pound DI-604 retails for just $59 while the SonicWall cost Granitar around $2,000. I love technology!
So after a quick test with my sister's Di-604 to make sure it didn't have the GoLive ftp problem - nope - I picked one up at Best Buy ($49 with a rebate) and retired the old SonicWall.
And after a few hours use, no problems so far...
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