SYSWAN SW24 VPN Dual WAN VPN Load Balancer 2 x 10/100Mbps WAN Ports 4 x 10/100Mbps LAN Ports

Pros: I'm not going to say "none", but I'm so irritated with these things I'm having a hard time thinking of any.

Cons: Unreliable VPN connections, interface is less than intuitive, documentation is anemic & confusing, failover doesn't seem to work (or the interface & documentation is so confusing I'm not setting it up right), tech support is apparently one guy in an office somewhere that may or may not ever contact you - you never get to talk to a human when you call.

Other Thoughts: I bought this thing mainly for a solid point-to-point VPN and secondarily for failover. The VPN tunnel drops constantly & almost never re-establishes itself. I have to manually log in to the devices on both ends and flush the tunnel & reload the policy.

I tried calling tech support but you NEVER get to talk to anyone when you call. You have to leave a message & then almost never get called back. You can send an email but those seem to be ignore completely. I got to talk to a woman one time and she said the tech was out. Apparently the entire support team of Syswan is one guy.

The one time I got to talk to The Dude he couldn't just tell me the proper settings for a permanent point to point VPN between two of his own devices. He wanted user/pass to access my network so he could just do it himself. Didn't even make the attempt to determine if I was a User in over my head or not, just flat out didn't want to talk to me.

Pros: Very inexpensive and it works well most of the time. Very extensive configuration settings without artificial limits that one might find in Cisco-related products.

Cons: Has occasional "hickups" where the box becomes unresponsive for 15-60 seconds. This happens very infrequently, but when it does, it also impacts routed traffic. This is the _only_ reason I give the device four eggs, where it otherwise would easily earn 5.

Other Thoughts: Configuring this unit is only for those who understand (or are willing to learn) all about the settings they are defining.

I wish it had a telnet or ssh connection so I could try to automate reboots to see if that would help with the occasional hesitation described above.

Pros: If you dont need to do any special configuration to your network, this is great.

Cons: Virtually no Tech Support.

Pros: NONE

Cons: The entire appliance and the support

Other Thoughts: The trash is the best place for this device and am going back to sonicwall

Pros: Good price, I was able to get decent support unlike other reviewers.

Cons: I purchased this device to allow for a failover connection to DSL in the event our office's cable connection goes down. Didn't work - I could unscrew the cable connection from the modem, wait and wait and it would NEVER fail-over to the DSL. The only way it did work was to physically remove power to the cable modem or unplug the Ethernet cable. Since most of the cable company's connection issues are upstream of our office, this wasn't a viable solution.

We also use a VoiP provider with Aastra 55i phones. With any consumer-grade router, all the phones would download their configuration data and be online within a minute. With the Syswan, there were ALWAYS three or four phones that would never get past the registration process. Syswan worked with us for hours on this issue, even providing beta firmware which didn't help.

Other Thoughts: Maybe this device will work in your particular environment. For us, it was a nightmare.

Pros: Great stable router. Not sure about stability on larger networks but it handles a house with 4 heavy inet users and 6 VPN's flawlessly.

Cons: None so far!

Other Thoughts: Newegg is also flawless as usual!

Pros: No hassles, does what I ask it to do. Solid uptime since I bought it over a month ago. The 4 eggs are mainly because I only use a fraction of the features and therefor cannot judge the unit comprehensively.

Cons: Couple superficial issues; the web UI is funky (but it works) and the unit was missing 1 rubber foot (but I put it in a rack). Nothing serious.

Other Thoughts: I put this into service at home to fail over a Cable line (backup is a much slower PPPoE DSL). I was load balancing initially, but because the DSL is so much slower I eventually setup a strict fail-over-only config that runs the Cable 100% (else, the DSL 100% when the Cable's out).

Other than that I have the device NAT and that's it. That said, it's been working fine, pushing enormous volumes of gaming, web, nntp packets without any problems or downtime.

I've had no real-world WAN failures since purchasing this but simulated a few Cable outages and everything worked as expected, flipping to the DSL when the Cable went down and flipping back to the Cable when it came back up.

Pros: Very stable router and flawless dual wan support. I love these so much I purchased five and deployed them across my networks without any issues. The new firmware fixed most of the bugs and I have had 100% up-time.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: I see a lot of people complaining they can't get these to work. I strongly feel they don't have the networking skills becuase I can configure and install this under 20 minutes without any glitches.

Also I have a solid VPN connection with 99.9% uptime between all five locations. Makes it very easy for me to mamange computers remotely.

Pros: There is nothing positive about this product. That 1 egg goes to NewEgg for fast delivery. They never let me down.

Cons: Installed it, configured both WANs, it wouldn't work. Connections dropped after 20 seconds of staying online. I checked both connections with 2 laptops directly connected to the incoming cables and they managed to hold a connection for a long time without a problem. The Syswan wouldn't. Tried upgrading to latest firmware, not much help.

Other Thoughts: I'm RMA'ing this right away. I really really wanted for this to work but I guess most of the times you gotta go with tried&true (talkin about Cisco/Linksys here). Hope this helps someone from wasting time.

Pros: The router has many features and is extremely configurable. The performance of this router is also quite good.

Cons: The VPN function does not work well. I constantly loose my VPN tunnel, and even though i have followed explicit tech support instructions, it fails to maintain consistent and dependable VPN tunnels.
The tech support for Syswan is lousy. It consists (from what i can tell) of one guy who answers e-mails. He does so at ease, with no urgency to your issue. Once he addresses your issue, and still you have a problem, you will never hear from him again. Tech support gets 1 egg.

Other Thoughts: At first i had serious browser/network connection problems with this router. I spoke with tech support (yup - same guy) and he eventually told me that they had a much newer firmware that addressed my particular issue. I had to get it e-mailed to me, as the one on the website was over a year old. Once again, it appears that the tech support / maintenance of this product is ex termly poor.