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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Belkin N1 Wireless Router: Neighbor-Friendly but Flawed Draft 11n

| Wireless Driver & Software

Routing Features – Firewall

Moving on to the Firewall section menus reveals pretty vanilla options. Up to 20 Virtual Servers can be set (Figure 8 shows a few sample settings using the internal application pick-list), along with a single DMZ machine. Triggered port mapping isn’t supported.

Virtual Server Screen

Figure 8: Virtual Server Screen (click image to enlarge)

The Client IP Filters screen lets you establish six different sets of outgoing port filters to control which Internet applications LAN users can access. But as Figure 9 shows, even though you get time controls, you’ll probably run out of filters unless your needs are very simple.

Client IP Filters Screen

Figure 9: Client IP Filters Screen

Rounding out the Firewall features are a Dynamic DNS client for dyndns.org and WAN ping blocking (enabled by default). There is also a very elementary Security Log that, from the looks of it, won’t be of that much use (Figure 10).

Security Log Screen

Figure 10: Security Log Screen

Among functions that would be useful, but are missing, are the ability to disable the firewall SPI functions and blocking of cookies, ActiveX and Java applets and web proxies.

Moving along, the Utilities menu holds pretty straightforward items such as the ability to restart and set the router to factory defaults. You can also save and restore router settings and update firmware after checking for updates with a handy button.

The System Settings screen is the catch-all for the assortment of settings shown in Figure 11. Of note here are the default disables for UPnP, firmware auto-update and the lack of an HTTPs option for remote management (or local, for that matter). I also found the NAT Enabling (disabling) function to be odd, considering the N1′s inability to set static routes and apparent lack of support for dynamic routing protocols.

System Settings screen

Figure 11: System Settings screen (click to enlarge)

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