Customer Reviews

NETGEAR FVS338 ProSafe VPN Firewall 50

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I bought 2 of these for vpn tunnel between 2 offices, after updating to the june 2007 firmware everything worked like a charm. I share IP based phone system, Ip based camera system, and exchange servers between the two offices, the vpn works great between both offices. Everything works no problems. Maybe this model had problems before but it seems great to me now... Oh another thing I called up netgear support to help me setup the vpn and they practically setup my vpn on both ends by remote login. They made sure everything worked and even called me next day to make sure everything was working fine. All I did later was change the passwords and the vpn key. Overall a good buy.

I have several of the FVS338's in place. They keep up a stable VPN between several sites and are easy to configure.

Problem is that I can't get the Netgear VPN client to work with it. (That is why I only gave it 4 stars). There are no updates for the client, and Netgear support is just plain incompetent in this area.

The reason I gave this such high marks is the throughput is 10Mb +, the VPN is easy to set up between routers, it is stable and best of all.. THE PRICE IS RIGHT!

My home network consists of several computers, both wired and wireless, all connected to the Internet via Cable Internet service.

I recently upgraded my service to a 15 megabits/sec download rate (which should provide 1500 to 1800 KBytes/sec download).

My old router was a Netgear FVS318v3 with the latest firmware. With the FVS318, the best speeds I could get were about 500KBytes/sec download, or only about 1/3 of what I should have been getting.

Connecting directly to the cable modem, of course, yielded full, expected speeds.

So, I did some research and discovered that many firewalls and routers do not have the throughput ability to keep up with a cable modem!

In fact, my old FVS318v3 was rated rather poorly among other routers.

However, the FVS338 had a good throughput rating of 90 megabits per second which was more than fast enough to handle my cable modem.

So, I removed my old router, installed the FVS338 and turned everything on. The first thing I did was to log into the router and upload the newest firmware from Netgear's support website. That went effortlessly.

Now, to run the speed test. Fingers crossed. Click the mouse button.... WOW!!! Full speed finally!

My downloads went from an average of 500 KBytes/sec to 1700 KBytes/sec (this of course depends on the particular website - some connections will be slow because of reasons outside of your control).

Peer-to-peer (lan) transfer speeds run around 9400 KBytes/sec, which tells me that this router is handling all the PC can put out.

This router has another feature that may be useful to a few people. It has a serial port on it that can be connected to an external dialup telephone modem. No, not DSL but that old, slow horrible "56K" thing. It's designed as a "fallback" to give you Internet connectivity if the main broadband cable modem goes down. It will be slow, but better than nothing.

Of course, to use this feature you need an external dialup modem and a dialup Internet Service Provider which is an extra cost that you will probably never need. Therefore, the serial port "fallback" feature is virtually worthless.

The only downside to this router is that the user needs some basic networking experience. A novice will be horrified by screen after screen of options and settings which can be configured.

The good news is, for most users the factory default settings don't need to be changed. There are things one may wish to set (such as what time zone you are in), but the router WILL work "out of the box" if you're afraid of complicated settings.

Unfortunately, I do not need or use one of the features of the FVS338 (the Virtual Private Networking - or VPN), so I can't comment on how it works.

In summary, if you need a firewall router that is FAST and can handle almost anything you throw at is, the FVS338 is for you. If you want a simple router that will work out of the box, the FVS338 is for you. If you are an IT expert and know how to set everything, the FVS338 is for you. The FVS338 is a little bit more expensive than other firewall routers, but it is packaged in a sturdy METAL box, it comes with Netgear's VPN client software (1 user license) and, of course, it's FAST.

So, all in all, the FVS338 is, in my opinion, a good product worth the price.

Pros: 50 VPN tunnels, 8 Port Switch, fully configurable firewall; Supports ProSafe Remote Access Client, Supports SNMP, Supports NAT and Classical routing. The FVS338 Can be easily programmed to block access to certain Websites. The router is reasonably priced

Cons: Dial backup requires an external modem, no full DMZ LAN interface, not directly rack mountable, Transformer power cord.

Initial network set up of the FVS338 was easy. Netgear has revised the GUI interface on their latest firmware releases. I loaded the latest firmware from the Netgear website which also was fairly easy. The VPN configuration allows the same IKE policy to be re-used when making multiple IPsec session connections to the same endpoint. VPN connections allow the use of Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDN) instead of IP addresses for the VPN endpoints. This is useful when your ISP frequently changes your IP address. The Dyndns feature will automatically update the IP address when it changes. The configurable secure Remote Management can be set up to allow access only from defined machines or networks on a specified port. From a price vs. feature perspective I would recommend this unit.

I've had one of these units for just about a year and haven't had any issues with it whatsoever. I connect to it through the client every single day and never had any issues. I bought it for my FIOS Connection which is a synchronous 20Mb/Sec and I expect will go faster soon. This is why I chose this unit with a 90Mb transfer speed but tests out at about 60Mb which is still great for its price point.

On the con side - They have has some issues with previous firmware versions. The latest 2.x seems to be the best although I haven't heard of many issues with 3.x either.

The manual is a bit lacking. When they went from version 1x firmware to 2.x they changed a lot including a wizard for setting up the VPN which is great but the documentation still seems to reflect the old firmware which will not work. The client settings are a little different otherwise you won't be able to get it to work.

I recently connected 2 sites together and I have to say it was a breeze to set up and has been very stable and great throughput. Since there isn't anything else in their price range I think that this is a great investment. Oh yeah lets not forget the lifetime warranty.

This is truly a great product.

It makes the configuration of a network (with inbound services) easy to perform. Yes, I gave it only four stars. It should be a five star product. There is one drawback and most will probably never run into it. Hopefully NetGear well address in their firmware making it a five star product:

If your default gateway IP address is NOT in the same subnet as your IP address, the FVS338 is not usable.

WAN IP: 70.225.xxx.xxx
Subnet: 255.255.255.248
Gateway IP: 68.250.xxx.xxx

Note the first octet of the IP addresses. To get around this, I placed the FVS338 behind an entry-level residential gateway (that does not seem to care) and configured the FVS338 this way:

IP Address: 192.168.246.2
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.246.1

Everything is fine, but I have the additional appliance and its latency delay in my network. I have opened problems with NetGear Tech Support, they also agree it is a problem, but so far I have not received a resolution.

I have the exact same configuration running on a Cisco 506E (PIX) that works fine. I have configured other routers and firewalls and this is the only one I have found so far that has this problem.

Like I said earlier, this may not be a problem for you. Check first. If you are using this behind a cable or DSL modem, you should be fine.

I have others that work great because their default gateway IP addresses are in the same subnet as the assigned IP address.

After all is said and done, I really like this product and NetGear has good Technical Support and I still recommend it. Notice I got around the problem instead of simply pulling it.

Enjoy: 2008/04/28

Easy setup even for mixed pc/mac/xbox360 usage. Very reliable. Most important - bandwidth beats those cheap routers. Had a $35 router and when anyone used the xbox360 live - you noticed. Now... never notice!

I have a very simple network to allow 3 computers and a Yamaha music keyboard to share the cable internet and to share files between the computers. For the last couple years I've been using a Netgear FVS318 and have been very happy with it. My cable company has claimed to increase my internet speed over that time but I could see no change. I finally decided the FVS318 was maxed out. When I installed the FVS338 the download speed from [...] went from slightly over 5 Mbps to consistently over 20. Well worth the cost of this device.

I've been using the Netgear FVS line of products for a while now and have been quite happy with them. The router comes with some REALLY nice features a few of which are: Port translation, a must have for users with ISPs that block ports. Bandwidth usage monitor again an essential feature for people who have ISPs that meter their bandwidth (cough, Comcast!) and the firewall is a must have for security of your network. One other additional feature that I am not currently making use of is the ability to auto-connect to a dialup account if your broadband connection dies, a cool and SLOW feature if you must use it, I am sorry. :D

I saw one review online recently where the reviewer mentioned this router did not seem to have A DHCP server, but this is inaccurate and I'm using it.

I am so pleased with this FVS338, its one heck of an upgrade for my old FVS318 that was fried by lightning. :(

BTW: I don't work for Netgear, but I have to say they have always consistently put out good hardware. I have noticed at times that firmware updates are necessary but once done they are extremely stable. I have -0- problems and can rest at ease knowing my network is secure. I also enjoy receiving security alerts from the router via email as well as my bandwidth usage summary at the end of every month.

I strongly recommend this product for anyone in the market for a router that works universally well.

We had to upgrade our firewall and were looking for cheaper options than CISCO that could offer us the same features. We found this one to have features better than the one that we were expecting and getting from CISCO and at a fraction of the price. Configuration was much easy on this as it was menu driven, unlike command-line configuration. We could do it ourselves easily. It also is a 8 port switch along with the firewall.