Customer Reviews

Cisco RV082 8-port 10/100 VPN Router - Dual WAN

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Okay, this will be brief and is being posted only as helpful hint rather than an indepth review.

If your speeds are fine when directly connected to your ISP, but are slow or unstable when running through the RV082 try the following:

Under the firewall tab, there is an MTU setting. You MUST take this off of Auto and use the manual setting. In my case the default manual setting of 1500 is what I needed. This solved the incredible slowdown problems I was having - in fact now I have the best speeds I have ever seen on my network.

Thanks to "Lone Stranger" and the Google search in which I found his post for finally providing me with this answer after hours of frustration. No thanks to linksys email support, who was of no use at all.

 

With all the mediocre reviews here, I was hesitant in buying this router. I bought it anyway because it is the cheapest router around with dual WAN and load balancing. Despite some of the earlier review, I am happy to report that I found everything worked including VPN, firewall, 1 to 1 NAT. And, they all worked fine together with one exception (see below).

But, I did find the router to be very unstable. In the last 2 months of operations, I have had to reset it at least a dozen times. In most cases, it either failed to route, assign DHCP addresses, connect VPN or the web interface failed to respond. And, it always requires a power down cold start. I am beginning to think the reset button on the front is for decoration only.
In the past 3 years, my primary WAN has only failed a handful of times, what good is dual WAN if the router fails more than that in just 2 months.

This doesn't include the hundred of times that I have to reset the unit during configuration. Sometimes, the unit's software will get itself into a knot after you save a configuration. It stills works (as a router) but some of the functions like NAT or VPN won't work correctly. This is very frustrating because you don't know if it is the software bug or wrong configuration. And, of course, there are the typical cases where the unit will completely freeze up after a config save. But, at least you can see it is dead and reset it.

The most disappointing thing I found was the one thing I liked about the router, dual WAN. The router will only keep both WANs up if you have it in auto load balance mode. Otherwise, it will to shut down the 2nd WAN even in manual balance mode. A problem if you want to use the IP address on the 2nd WAN for incoming traffic. The other problem is that the VPN doesn't always work when it is in load balance mode but it works fine in single WAN backup mode.

Bottom line, you get what you paid for and I will not buy this unit again. Definitely not worth the headache of having the whole office scream at you every other day because the Internet is down, again!

 

Good small business router

Strengths:
Load balanced Internet connection options are great. Decent firewall.

Weaknesses:
VPN is a little complicated to connect to from xp/2000 Client. Have to play with the IPSec settings.

I am using the RV042 and a RV082 to connect an office in the US with an office in East Europe. The VPN is working perfectly.
- Excellent performance.
- Very reliable.

I purchased the RV082 box because it is certified for interoperability test by www.vpnc.org . It seems to be the only one Linksys VPN product that pass the test. I am lucky that I made a right decision.
I set up a VPN Network using RV082 in my main office. One computer use Safenet as a VPN client at Home. Another 5 Computers using Linksys BEFVP41 as the VPN box to connect to RV082 from the Branch Office. They are working together like they were in the same office . I can monitor the VPN connection status from its VPN summary table.
There are also 15 PCs sharing the internet connection in the main office. The performance is really good.
I have not test the dual WAN function yet.
I will test it once my second link is ready.

Recommended!!

I've recently had the chance to play around with this router. I'm really impressed by its features. DHCP can assign my servers a static IP, this is very handy. No more trying to reboot the systems in the correct order to get the IPs assigned right. No hard coding of static IPs into the boxes themselves. I like it. The firewall features are solid. The load balancing feature sounds nice (2 WAN connections), but I've not had the chance to test it. Priorities on the 8 port switch can be assigned, using QoS -- something not normally seen on a consumer level router. It supports RIP v1 and v2 as well. The VPN features seem to be pretty robust also. It has been reported that the VPN throughput can reach 67Mbps -- that is blazing fast. I've managed to setup 2 tunnels to it using both the W2K and XP IPSec clients. It seems to be a really nice router for the price.

I originally purchased a Xincom 503 Dual WAN router and wasted many many hours with its firmnware and configuration bugs - it never worked well. Eventually (months later) I gave up on waiting for Xincom bugs to be fixed and purchased this LinkSys RV082. Setup was simple and straight forward and it worked reliably since day 1. It came with the latest firmware loaded.

I'm using this router to load balance my cable and DSL broadband connections. I haven't tried and am unlikely to need the VPN features of the RV082. I do use it to host various mail and web servers and the port forwarding features and 1-to-1 maps of static WAN IP's to local IP's work very well.

I wish the DMZ was shared with a LAN port rather than the second WAN (you can't have both at once, so the choice is single WAN + DMZ or DUAL WAN and no DMZ).

The unit has a quality look and feel which is also reflected in its solid performance. Recommended without hesitation.

Update Oct 2006:
The router fault light came on after months of reliable operation and the unit would no longer work. Linksys did a cross-shipment with a brand new replacement (since it was within the warranty period).

I remain very happy with the router and would definately buy again despite needing a replacement. LinkSys cross-shipment worked well and the replacement arrived in about two ot three days.

Appearance and initial impression:
I knew when I saw the Cisco stamp on the front then I knew that this was a serious piece of equipment. It arrives in a nice metal casing with mounting hardware. It would have been nice to have all the plugs on the back with the power and the lights up front instead of having lights and e-net plugs on the same side (but this follows in line with most of Cicso switch hardware).

Functionality:
Everything worked just as advertised (granted I have only been using the box for a week). The GUI works just like every other Linksys product and makes setup & maintenance a breeze. Got our VPN tunnel to connect two offices set up effortlessly inside of 5 min using two of these boxes. It truly is a one-in-all box Another reviewer said that firewall had to be disabled, but I believe that it was fixed with my firmware as I had no problems with that. I also like the ability to load balance / failover with two DSL devices (which as a good selling point for the client.)

Summary:
Cool device, I would recommend to anyone needing to bridge two or more (up to 50) offices effortlessly and cheaply.

Disclaimer:
I am an independent IT pro with no affiliation to any hardware/software manfgr. In other words I dont work for LinkSys and I am saying nice things because I really like the box :)

Overall the router is relatively fast. The VPN options are plentifull, but beware if you are not experienced with VPN you will have to put some time into learning and configuring VPN. For remote connectivity simplicity, you can use the quick VPN client, but that requires software installed on the remote client. I also liked the unit because it has a backup port that can be used in case your primary broadband connection fails or you can load balance between the two WAN ports. With that said, I am a home user and really don't have a need for the backup /load balancing functionality, but I'm a sucker for technology.

This router is no longer supported by Cisco Linksys. At the beginning of 2011 they came out with an equipment verion 3 that is black and gray and that is the only version supported. I bought a verion 2 last year and the new firmware released this month doesn't work on my version.

At this point it is unknown if any updates will ever be released for older versions. Cisco may just want us all to fill up the landfills with security vunerable older versions so they can reap the revenues.

Be careful before you purchase this unit.

 

I purchased this product and spent countless hours trying to establish the VPN connection throgh the firewall. Turns out that the VPN tunnel does not work, if you enable the firewall. The Linksys support mentioned to me that they became aware of it few weeks ago. I guess it wasn't tested properly before it was released to public. Good thing is that the VPN does work. I am using Windows 2000 client for my testing.