Network Security

I’m playing with a handful of hand-me-down routers for my home network. I have a Netgear WGT624 - has some cool features including Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI), and hey - it looks cool. After an hour, it stopped routing. Once I pulled the power, it came back to life. Not a good sign.

My Netopia 3546 is an integrated DSL modem/router, which is nice - it saves having another box in my office. It’s got all the bells and whistles I could want, but doesn’t do SPI. It seems silly to use my wireless routers with SPI as access points behind a less featureful, less secure router.

I bought a Belkin F5D7230-4 wireless-G router a year ago. In this case, bought = $50 with $50 in mail-in rebates. and haven’t used it until now. A few things turned me off - it’s got subscription-based content filtering - I don’t want to deal with a firewall I have to pay a yearly fee for. It doesn’t support static DHCP reservations, and the interface is a little rocky.

I did a little research, and found out that this router is a Broadcom-powered embedded system running Linux, just like the Linksys WRT54G.

The WRT54G can run a GPL firmware image called OpenWRT, uses familiar Linux firewall and networking tools, and it expandable. The folks at Hackaday even found a link to a way to add an SD card to the unit, effectively making your firewall a dinky, quiet linux box.

Unfortunately, the Belkin model I have doesn’t have enough flash memory to run OpenWRT, but knowing it’s running Linux gives me some confidence in its’ ability to run without crashing. It’s also tempting to try some of the open firmware images floating around, and if I brick* the router, I can switch back to the Netgear.

Interestingly, I found out there was a class-action suit filed against Belkin, and they’re offering a refund of purchase price on units if the customer “believe(s) that the data throughput rate you are obtaining is not what you expected”. Hmmm. Time to hit one of the speed test sites and see how I do. 160 KBytes/sec. I’m paying for 768kilobits/sec down/128 up, and my killer ISP had SBC up my limit since I’m close to the central office. My line is more like 1.2 down/384 up.

My collection thus far:

Netopia 3546-2
SMC Barricade 7004BR, given to my dad
Netgear WGT624
Belkin F5D7230-4
Orinoco RG-1000