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Trevor contemplates Consumer Netgear gear. BUT does it pass the cat hair test?

A real life furball survivor

Netgear UTMs

I am a little more cautious of the UTMs. The software in them is dated, licensing is convoluted and there are some bugs.

The UTM 150 that I have has an inability to route between multiple subnets without those subnets being on different VLANs. Considering most of Netgear's customers operate great big flat layer 2 networks, that one is just plain odd.

Also, Netgear has a mixed history of support with these units. A number of showstopper bugs have been found, reported, and far more time than was acceptable taken before fixes were issued. Two years ago things were pretty dire for Netgear in this space.

They've improved quite a bit since. After a bunch of bad press around their security handling, some dustups with staff and key community contributors, my sources – and my updates – tell me that Netgear is back on track. I still think that the UTM and VPN appliances need a massive overhaul for user friendliness, but they seem to have locked the things down and got them into "good enough" territory.

You aren't going to defend a Fortune 2000 with a Netgear UTM. These will never compete with Palo Alto Networks; they are two completely different tiers of product. But they are a good edge device for a small business looking for something a little bit more powerful than your typical broadband router, but doesn't have the money to afford the heavy artillery.

It just works

I remember being quite sad when my Linksys WRT54g died. I picked it up in September of 2003 and it gave me 10 good years of service. It was an absolute tank of a router, and DD-WRT extended its capabilities a thousandfold. With that device I could do things that – off the shelf, at least – you typically needed a Cisco router ten times the cost to accomplish.

I loved that little router.

Among a certain crowd, those WRT54g routers were legendary. The key to their importance being the ability to extend their capabilities with OpenWRT, DD-WRT, Tomato or other third-party distributions. In 2003, this was necessary. The routers on offer were crap.

Similarly, NASes in those days were awful. Consumer switches couldn't even do VLANs. "Consumer" gear in general was just unable to sustain anything beyond a handful of users working in a very simple network.

Not so today's kit. If Netgear is the middle-of-the-road provider for SMBs, what they're fielding is light years beyond what we struggled with at the turn of the millennium. You could run a 250-seat network off their network offerings. You can get decent performance from their NASes.

Nothing's perfect, naturally, but you don't need an EMC SAN running on Cisco switches to make a modest business work reliably anymore. The prejudices so bitterly ingrained about the limits of consumer hardware need revisiting. Your experiences, as always, in the comments, please. ®

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