Customer Reviews

NETGEAR FVX538 ProSafe VPN Firewall 200

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

While I have been very pleased with the performance of this product, configuration and setup was very easy, and even updates to the device are easy to do, it's not reliable.

It seems that every 3 or 4 days I lose connection to the Internet. This is a 7 PC network, couple of servers. There really isn't huge bandwidth being used. But it is like it gets frozen - you can't ping it, you can't get to anything on the outside like the gateway or DNS servers, and a simple power reset gets it working again.

Nothing is in the log, I have to believe this is some sort of firmware problem. I have checked all the ideas on Netgear's site without help. I know at least some of the time it freezes during the middle of the night, when no one is using it. Could it be getting zapped from the outside somehow? But it sure is not reliable, I can't recommend it.

The other review for this item might scare you into not buying it, but we installed one of these firewalls to protect my employers network and it has performed flawlessly. We liked it's gigabit capability, and that it can be connected to 2 internet sources for redundancy or to increase capacity. We also like it's construction, which is a solid metal cabinet which seems to shed heat nicely and has enough heft to say put if it's simply set of a shelf.

I am a Netgear fan. I have a lot of equipment in my home, and have always found Netgear to be a reliable brand that just works! I had a fvs318 that worked great for years, but could not keep up with my upgraded Internet connection. I got 29M out of the modem, but it petered out to 7M by the time it got to the desktop. A new fvs318 made no difference. This baby hums! 29M right to my desktop with easy setup. I DO wish it had ore than one Gigabit port, but that's a minor hassle.

I've owned several FVX538 over the years, deploying the first one in 2003. Back then they weren't the most reliable or easy to configure appliances on the market but they were considerably more cost effective than the other appliances that were available at the time. I ended up with two v1 units running 7x24x365 for five and six years respectfully. However, both v1 units have up and died, first one in February 09 and the second unit failed last week. The symptoms were consistent on both units...they would simply stop passing traffic and hang. A hard reboot may or may not recover the unit. If it did recover it would only run for an hour or two and then hang again. February of this year I replaced my five year old unit with a v2 and it has been very stable since deployment. The second v1 gets replaced today and I expect a simple 15 min deployment. Unfortunately, Netgear does not provide a repair service (even if you want to pay for the repair) and won't do anything for you if the unit is out of warranty, so you have to discard them as trash! The v1 units were only covered by a three year warranty, the v2 are lifetime so I feel much better about the v2's. As for the software, the latest code is straight forward and easy to configure, feature rich and stable. The dual WAN works well, maybe a tad slow on cut-over but it starts passing traffic within 90-120 seconds. All-in-all the FVX538 v2 is a very cost effective, solid and reliable unit. However, I would recommend you have a cold spare for critical networks - when they go down, next day delivery just isn't fast enough.

It lacks some features, like a command-line dump of its configuration (it uses a proprietary binary format) and some routing features; but it works, and is cheap. We had problems with the stability of vpn channels when connecting to Juniper NetScreen equipment (the channels would go down at least weekly and have to be manually reset), so I'd stick to netgear-to-netgear vpns with this box.

I basically have mixed feeling about this router. My company was looking for a new router that can handle more LAN traffic, provides VPN functionality, and support two WAN lines with failover or load balancing. This is the only router (that I can found) that provides all these features at a very reasonable price. Basically, it has a lots of features and functionality for a small business environment - only if you can get them to work. Basically, if you are only going to use this router for a basic setup, it will probably work great. However, if you are going to do a little more advanced setup, you may want to stay away. When we first got the router last October, we tried to setup VPN. It worked fine with the 1.0 firmware but our WAN (DSL line) keeps dropping intermittently. If you read reviews on Newegg and Amazon, you will see other people is having the same problem. Needless to say, we were on the phone with Netgear support (located in India) for hours. Finally, they asked us to upgrade the firmware to v2. That seems to solve the connection problem but the VPN software no longer work. We worked with tech support for another 10 hours but were not able to get a satisfied answer. We gave up. If you check the product support page, there is still no documentation update on how to setup VPN with the 2.0 firmware. Earlier this year, we added a T1 (in addition to the DSL line) for redundancy. We proceeded to setup the router for load balancing. We also have a couple of entries for port forwarding so people can remote into PC on the network (since we gave up on VPN). Well, we had the hardest time getting a connection to the T1 line. The T1 provider finally solved the problem by asking us to change the port speed on the Netgear to 100BaseT instead of AutoSense. However, with load balancing, the port forwarding no longer works. After digging around, we found that the 2.1.0-7 firmware (released on May 5, 2007) fixed this problem. But we are now having a problem with the DSL line where we cannot reach certain hosts (but the connection is still up). Basically, this router still has a lot of problems and bugs. Just take a look at their bug fixes list on the product support page. And these are not minor problems, but functionality that you expect the router to work out of the box.

I am giving it three stars because it has potential - when they finally get all the bugs work out - but in the meantime, you may have a hard time getting it working the way you want.

I finally gave up on this dual wan router. Our use is mission critical. Whenever this router would lock up and cease to function, I would have to travel to our office all hours of the night or weekend to power cycle it to resume service. I installed every firmware upgrade for the past nine months, with hope that this time the freeze ups would be fixed. I could no longer tolerate the poor service. I have replaced this router with a single WAN port Dlink (I had to give up using the dual WAN months ago because of poor reliability), and not only does the Dlink NOT lockup every couple days, but the network speed and response time increased! I had been blaming my cable provider for the poor Internet speed, but it was this Netgear router all along. Do not purchase this router unless you want to constantly deal with the headaches that it gives.

Had it for 2 years, it was rebooting by itself until one day decided to reboot and never came back.
I will try Zywall i read almost any other firewall is better than netgear FVX538.

Let me start by saying I have owned and maintained three of these expensive devices beginning in 2004. Why three? Well, because two of them have died in service after the three-year "warranty" expired. Why then own them? Because they permit you to connect two different broadband connections for reliability of internet access.

However, even the latest model V2 with firmware 3.06-29 (up to date as of this writing) has plenty of weird quirks. Importantly, although you can "reserve" an IP for a given device, this feature has never worked reliably over who-knows-how-many updates, versions and firmware updates.

Secondly a $400 router which dies within five years of purchase is simply not acceptable, especially if a call to the "support" line produces the answer: Throw it away and buy another router. I wouldn't have minded paying for a repair so I could retain the last one to die as a backup unit, but "toss it out" after less than five years in operation is an insult.

Well, I'd like to recommend this device, I obviously think it meets certain needs of my own, but the poor attitude of the manufacturer and their weird inability to sort out some very basic issues after years of production and software revision is not encouraging.

I work from a home office and spend all day on the internet. My business depends on internet access so there are few times I can be without. Until CLEAR arrived, my choices had been DSL from TELCO and cable from COMCAST. I spent time first with cable, had lots of problems with the service (I'm at the end of the line), then decided to try DSL. It was more dependable but slower. So I looked for a router that could host both services simultaneously. Hence this Netgear router. It does everything I need plus I can block any sites so other client machines can't surf. Most importantly, it has an excellent hardware firewall and DMZ so I can host services without worrying about my LAN. Cool stuff!
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