There, fixed.

 

Exactly. Cisco bought them for their name and market ownership in the low end switch/router market, not because they think their product is great.

 

the netgear routers out now do offer stateful packet inspection, whereas most dlink/linksys are NAT only.

 

i've went thru 3 netgear routers and 1 linksys...
my vote goes to linksys without a doubt...

 

Now, what does this SPI firewall do exactly?

 

Stateful Packet Inspection (aka SPI or dynamic packet filtering) is a firewall security technique. SPI inspects the contents of packets, monitoring traffic, including a history of the source of packets. Then it applies administrator-defined rules to traffic coming to a LAN.

SPI closes ports until legitimate users request them opened. SPI prevents certain kinds of Denial of Service attacks. As such, SPI is a useful part of a more comprehensive security plan for your network.

An example of SPI: When the router notices pings over a certain time from the same address, the packets are dropped.

Another example: SPI allows a router to know if the packet source address is inside a LAN. If an attack is launched from the WAN using an internal address, a non-SPI router would slow, being unable to tell where to respond. SPI routers compare packets to previous packets, and drops those violating the rules.

 

I'd go for the Netgear. I just got a Pre-N MIMO (Multi In Multi Out) router from Netgear. This router operates on 802.11 A and G at the same time. So you should get a stable stream of 100+ MPS with this router. Range has also been increased. This router also has Wireless Protected Access or WPA, next gen security feature. I've has 2 Netgear's and I have had no issues with them. Router is about $150 the cards are still expensive about $99.


Above all please lock down your wireless routers. I use netstumbler and I can

 

[QUOTE=seminole2001,Mar 9 2005, 09:28 AM] Above all please lock down your wireless routers. I use netstumbler and I can