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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a computing fan, January 11, 2002
This is the road I took to finally being able to stay with this router. I have a tendency of being really indecisive when buying things. I bought the RP114 and returned it and got the Linsys BEFSR41, then returned it and got the RP114 again. If you have a choice of between RT114, RT314, RP114 then get the RP114 because it's the newer model and is functionally the same as the RT114 plus more. RT314 will likely be discontinued.What I like:
The RP114 has a solid construction made of metal. It feels solid and durable in my hands, unlike the Linksys model, which is made of plastic. Of course, this doesn't really say much, but I like my hardware to have some weight to it. Plus, the 4 little rubber feet (?) at the base of the router is well balanced and helps it from moving around too much. The Linksys wasn't balanced at all. It kept rocking back and forth because one of the rubber feets were higher than the other. What I also like about this router is that it's got little holes on the bottom of the router so that you can mount it on the wall. My desk is really cluttered from zip drive to palm docking station to left over food to you name it. And the wall mounting feature really saves me valuable space and helps keep it in place without much movement.
It has a Link/Activity indicator, for each of four LAN ports and the WAN port. It also has a 100 BaseT indicator to show whether the NIC is connected at 100 Mbps to the router (of course, they are auto-sensing 10/100 BaseT). The unit is firmware upgradable. It also has Content Filtering where you can enter up to 255 keywords. If someone tries to bring up a web page or url contain these keywords it'll display a message saying that this page is blocked. Albeit it seems a very simple thing, I really like that it displays a message saying that it's blocked instead of the web page just hanging and not showing anything, making the user think that something is wrong with the router. It's very useful if you have children and want to control what they can and can't view! You can also log these access and have it scheduled to send an email to a user. The following two were the deciding factors for me. I used to share my internet connection through a regular dial up connection with ICS before I got my cable modem connection. Thus, I bought myself a 50 ft cross-over cable. I was delighted to find out that the LAN ports on the RP114 are able to distinguish between the two different types of cables (MDI/MDI-X)! So I just used my old cross-over cables and didn't have to hand over another $30 or so on a new 50 ft cable.
The second deciding factor was the high configurability of the router. I like the web interface to configure the system, but you can also telnet into the router and do so much more! What I don't like & Wish list:
The only reason it doesn't deserve 5 stars are as follows. I don't know if it's just me or not, but I really like having a printed manual. The unit ships with practically no printed manual. It comes with a one page Installation Guide. All the other manuals are on the CD in PDF or HTML. This shortcoming probably isn't something I can blame Netgear for, because this is the nature of the beast -- NAT routers work by allowing multiple computers to share a single IP address. When I use IRC, the server checks my IDENTD server. I can use port forwarding on port 113 (?) to make it connect to the built in IDENTD server in MIRC, which is fine and dandy, but I have to always have either MIRC with IDENTD server running, or run a separate IDENTD server on my machine. This is fine, too, except I share my connection with my brother and he gets the same user@host as me, because port forwarding only fetches the first entry in its list and uses that for all the computers. This can be problematic because some servers don't let multiple instances on their servers. This means a specific port number can only be assigned to one machine. If me and my brother both run a FTP server on port 21, it will ALWAYS be forwarded to the first entry in the port mapping. This is okay when we are in control of what port number to use, but in cases like IRC and IDENT, all the server seems to connect to port 113, so this is out of the clients' control. I think this would also be a problem with sending files over Instant Messenging programs and DCC in IRC. I remember Linksys had something to overcome this (not entirely sure?), but it wasn't working correctly for some reason. It would have been nice to have a work around for this. Bottom line:
From practical use, I've had no problems whatsoever save for the minor annoyance with the port mapping and server port sharing. I haven't had to reset the router yet for any reason, and my status page shows my uptime to be 1104 hours (46 days). I'd highly recommend this router to anyone looking for a home router to share broadband.
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