Review on 🔒 NETGEAR ProSAFE FVS318N Wireless-N VPN Firewall: 8-Port Solution with SSL and IPSec VPN (FVS318N-100NAS) by Cory Mosley

I'll start by saying I've been a fan of Netgear for a very long time and have bought several of their products in the past. But while Netgear used to make really solid products that worked well, they fell into the trap of making terrible products that couldn't stand up to even the most basic use cases. My love for Netgear began to fade shortly after I bought it. several WNCE2001 and caused them to crash my network. (You can read my review here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R39J7L56W455O7/) I called it old and out of production, but my confidence in Netgear products started to wane. Then came this thing, the FVS318N firewall. The firewall I had previously was the FVS318G and it was excellent - so much so that when it came time to replace it I immediately wanted something newer in the NETGEAR ProSafe range. And so I found the FVS318N and ordered it without further ado. My first mistake. The firewall came, I updated the firmware and re-entered my network configuration on the new device. (I should point out here that I'm an IT security professional with over 15 years of experience, so I know how to bypass firewalls and such.) The first day the firewall worked perfectly. The speeds were a lot faster than what I'm used to, which was nice. But after the first 24 hours the connection through the firewall became terribly unstable. 33% of connections started dropping immediately due to an accidental connection reset. I decided it was time to contact Netgear support. My second mistake. I opened my support ticket on December 5th, 2014. The first level tech did some basic troubleshooting and asked me to downgrade the firewall firmware to factory state, then we updated it to the penultimate firmware to see if the issue was related to the latest firmware. Nothing helped, so the problem was "transferred" to the engineers, who immediately returned and said that the problem was in the DNS. A terrible diagnosis, since such a failure has nothing to do with DNS. (DNS doesn't kill existing connections, it does the job of converting hostnames to IP addresses so the initial connection can be made.) I followed their ridiculous suggestion and told them that wasn't the problem. They also asked me to start a syslog server and log the firewall on it, which I did. It was December 17th and that's where the problem got stuck. I updated the firmware again to more reliably reproduce the issue and continued logging to the syslog server. On the 18th I uploaded the logs to the Netgear Support Portal after reproducing the issue. On the 19th it was "brought up to the next level of support" again, where everything in turn died. I asked for an update on the 23rd and got no response. I requested another update on January 5th and received no response until January 13th when Netgear requested access to a host on my network. They actually asked for a host with Wireshark and PuTTY, after which I told them that I don't have windows machines but can give them access to a linux machine with tcpdump and ssh and I asked if that was possible. acceptable. On January 30th they agreed, so I immediately provisioned a new VM and gave them access starting February 1st. That's when my ticket hit the wall. A week later (February 8th) I updated the ticket stating that I received no response from Netgear and needed an update because this firewall was crippling my network. I was told "engineers are working on it" but the logs of the car I gave them said otherwise. In fact, nobody but me has ever entered this box. At Netgear Engineering, no one paid attention to this problem at all. So, today we are here. I have a completely unusable firewall and the company that makes it has absolutely no interest in fixing it. Also, I'm not the only one with this problem - I've provided you with several links to the Netgear forums of people with the same problem. Google is giving away even more people with the problem, and this has been a problem since the firewall was first released. So yeah, Netgear isn't for me anymore. Is always. I would also advise you to keep your distance. They make terrible products and they have terrible support behind their products. Don't waste your money or time.