Pros: -When it worked it work well

Cons: -This is the second unit I have gone through. It was hooked up to a battery backup, but it stopped working after 4 months.

Pros: This used to be a great VPN router/firewall. We've deployed dozens of these without issue up until about 6 months ago.

Cons: Since about 6 months ago, every one of these that we've installed have factory reset themselves whenever they get rebooted. For obvious reasons, this is completely unacceptable in a business environment as it takes the entire network down with it. Yes, we've upgraded them all to the latest firmware, but still the same.

Other Thoughts: Cisco SMB support denies any fault too, which just makes matters worse.

Pros: Lot's of features on these things. Point to Point VPN tunnels are solid.

Cons: I have purchased a dozen or more of these. I loved the original versions (pre-Cisco) and still have a few in use. These Cisco tagged ones setup the same way and when you get a good one, are solid and fast. However, in one installation, I have had 3 of these go bad in 1 year. They will all of a sudden reset on their own to factory defaults and won't hold their configs. Hopefully Linksys will get back to QC.

Other Thoughts: I have many of these and the RV082 in use. Overall, they are a very solid bunch of routers and for the price, very competitive. I think they just went through a period where the hardware was not up to snuff.

Pros: Cheap
Lots of functions
Highly Configurable

Cons: Low Quality Hardware
A few bugs in the software

Pros: I've installed several of these RV042 as well as RV082 and RV016 routers in small business networks and they perform very well. I have many of them running Site to Site VPN's with automatic failover to the secondary WAN with a different ISP and they have been pretty reliable over the years.

Cons: out of all of the RVXXX models, the RV042 has given me the most problems but nothing to really complain about. I had one lock up on a reboot and I had to use a Cisco firmware recovery utility to get it back into operation but the utility was available on the manufacturers product website and free to download and I was able to recover relatively quickly but I did have a backup router available, otherwise my experience would have been a much bigger nightmare. Over all though, I have several of these models installed and working flawlessly at other sites so that may have just been a rare bad case scenario.

Other Thoughts: These are some of the best routers I've used in small business installations, they are packed with features and the price is very affordable for what you get. However, if it's mission critical, I would recommend always having a spare on hand just in case.

Pros: More features than your average home router. Multiple WANs being the most obvious (and important) one.

The second most important feature being the ability to set up a VPN tunnel between routers. (In my case home/office).

It does what it say it'll do. I won't get too far into the "Pros" here, because this router in no way exceeded my expectations. It worked in accordance with the features set forth by the manufacturer.

Cons: [Full disclosure: This review should have been written in 2008. I don't know how much they've changed these routers or how much more advanced the firmware has gotten in the interim. I figure if they were terribly different then they'd have changed the model number by now. I'm shocked that these are still for sale, and that's why I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents this late in the game.]

I bought two of these: One for home and one for the office. Both locations had redundant WAN connections, and these boxes seemed like a great way to take advantage of them.

The two cons here are such big cons that I can't possibly give this more than one egg:

- They were S-L-O-W. I think they'd max out at around 3 or 4 mbit. That's megaBIT, not megaBYTE. I'd tried firmware upgrades/downgrades, but they'd never get faster. I'd bought both units a few months apart, so I doubt I got them both from a bad batch. That just seemed to be the way of things.

- One failed after about 18 months. The other failed after a little over 2 years.

At this price point and with Cisco's name on them, I expected these routers to at least be reliable. They weren't.

I have friends that have used Cisco Small Business gear since it started being sold. From everything I've heard they're generally awful.

Other Thoughts: If you're looking for a router with veritably infinite features that's also cheap, go with Linux / iptables. That's what I did years ago and I've never looked back. At my office I have dual (very old) Dell Optiplex GX260s with a whole bunch of NICs. They're redundant to each other (using keepalived), and haven't had a hiccup in 5 years -- they haven't even needed to fail over. You don't need a powerful machine; I still have an emergency access VPN hub running on a PIII 667Mhz box -- it works great and can still max out my WAN at 50mbit.

I know that this sounds like insane advice. There's no GUI handholding (though there are some *nix distributions that are GUI-configurable routers), and no manufacturer support or warranty. But it works. It's hard and nasty DIY, but you're not going to get performance and reliability and a huge feature set at this sort of price point otherwise.

(Sorry for the rant, but I've reserved a special place in the H-E-double-toothpicks of my mind for wee little desktop routers).

Pros: Easy to configure out of the box.
Fail-over mode is good.
Decent logging.

Cons: This router performs horribly in dual-wan load balance mode. The CPU is so slow that there are constant disconnects, and attempting to connect remotely requires retry after retry.

No MTU setting or other advice from Cisco resolves the issue. If you want to use a router in dual wan mode, not failover mode, this is NOT the router for you.

Pros: have 3 locations with vpn tunnel using these, runs stable.
vpn setup is pretty easy to do.
been running them for over a year, one link had been up for over 9months straight
vpn summary page makes it easy to see which tunnels are working

Cons: had one unit go bad- vpn kept disconnecting, vpn failed completely and had to factory reset to get back into device. Web interface seems a bit dated, in certain config areas its possible to put in bad characters (like : )which can crash the device.

Also, this only allows traffic on the same internal subnets to access eachother via vpn- so you can't have someone in site A use the internet in site B via this device. Also, if you have multiple subnets- you won't be able to send them across the tunnel- only one subnet, and just the one the device is on internally can access the vpn tunnel. (basically you can't create custom routes for the vpn tunnel)

Other Thoughts: If you have problems with the VPN, make sure you have 'keepalive' turned on. Also, if the vpn seems to just stop working after awhile and you need to restart the device- your device is bad. I have 5 of these and have only had to replace 1 due to failure.

Remember to change from default login- I get hits all the time from bots trying to login.

Works great if you need to setup a satellite office but don't care to have their internet go through the vpn. Also nice for offsite backups.

Pros: Dual WAN
Easy to configure

Cons: Site to Site VPN's won't stay connected.

Other Thoughts: If you intend to use this for site to site VPN's do some research first. These units won't stay connected, and won't reconnect on their own. This has been going on since they were released and have yet (11/13) to be fixed.

Pros: I had read some of the reviews on this device and have to admit I was a bit worried at first. Granted I have a relatively easy topology - Two business class Cable connections with static IP addresses - but this device was EASY to setup and get the VPN tunnel established. The menu system did take a minute to get used to, but once you do you can have two routers setup from factory defaults to working on your network with a VPN established in about 10 minutes. Port forwarding is very easy with the predefined services, and it is very easy to add your own port requirements should the fall outside the normal defined services. The QuickVPN client from cisco connected to both routers with no problems after the users were added to the VPN user list defined in the routers themselves. The price point on these devices are also very attractive for what you get. I would highly recommend these devices to anyone in a small office environment.

Cons: Cons... well at this point I don't really have any. If the hardware fails quickly I will update this post to reflect that, but right now about the worst thing I can say is that it is weird that the power cord plugs into the side of the device instead of the back... but other than being weird who really cares about that.

Other Thoughts: I think I covered most of what needs to be said in the other areas, but I will add a quick summary here. These routers are very easy to use and do exactly what they are supposed to do. These are not user level devices, but junior level IT people could set these up without any issues. Great products, I was very happily surprised at what I got based upon the price and some of the negative reviews.

Highly recommend for small ofices!! :)