LINKSYS LRT214 Business Gigabit VPN Router

Pros: Price, standard router features excluding the VPN

Cons: I am a reseller, and put the router at clients office. The VPN was EXTREMELY Slow! Contacted Linksys support for help... updated firmware and reset the router, still N/G. Support told me it could be the pc I was using to vpn into the router. Tried a different pc (a new clean of any firewalls or antivirus programs laptop..) Still slow... purchased a new router, same model. Updated fireware, reset and configured... Same results... contacted support on a Thursday at approx 2 pm.. was told I had to try a different location to log into the vpn. I explained I had to wait until I get back to my office (25 miles away) but have a higher level support contact me. Tired that night.. Same issue. Now it gets just completely out of hand. Linksys support calls me and emails at 503pm Saturday... (they get no answer because the business is closed!) They then call again on Sunday at 326 pm. They get no answer and then email me they are closing the case... So much for buying a BUSINESS router! It made me feel like the router doesn't work so they avoided me during business hours.. and then were quick to close the case. I will be returning the 2nd router to Newegg and most likely end up eating the 1st one. Unless they recontact me and fix this issue I will never be buying their products again! FYI I have emailed support back with all the details and I am waiting for a reply!

Overall Review: This router Does not work as a VPN router, at this time I would not buy ANY products from Linksys because of the experience I had with their support.

Pros: Speed (both the device itself and when settings changes are made) Highly configurable Great new Linksys GUI No restarts necessary after any changes made

Cons: Not one

Overall Review: Am honored to be the first to review this new product from the new Linksys line of Small Business stuff. They have definitely hit the ball out of the park on this one, finally. Highly configurable re: firewall access rules, port forwarding, DHCP etc. It can even function as a Local/Internal DNS server via its own database. One change in this router that was new to me was IP to MAC Binding (which is not its design-intent or purpose, but ends up replacing & functioning like, IP Address Reservation.) Also has OpenVPN support. This device is actually a delight, if I can use that word, to configure. Many routers' GUIs are slow to respond, or refresh after a change & Save- not this one. Changes are immediate. The page refreshes immediately, no restart prompts nag you after each change. The GUI is fast. The processor in this router acts quite robustly, which may be how its GUI responds so quickly. This is also likely why its bandwidth handling/speed is so lithe also-- handles high-speed internet connections flawlessly- even with its Firewall enabled and SPI turned on. Only 1 firmware update since its release end of 2013, which does have some good fixes in it, so upgrade that first and then you're off. Great router for small office/small biz; great router for home too- but you'll just want to be familiar with Access Rules, Port Forwarding and their functions. PS Be sure to put it in Gateway mode (not, counterintuitively to most Home users, in Router mode- Router mode is only when you have other routers elsewhere on the network). (This aligns with its primary audience i.e. Enterprise or small business networks and how they're typically designed with routers/switches/gateways-- but by all means, fully functional in home environment as well so don't be afraid.) Can't say enough. Outstanding.

Pros: Dual WAN for fail-over Good online UI

Cons: Getting OpenVPN to work correctly on this router is impossible, and Linksys is useless on supporting their own product. Their support forms are helpless.

Overall Review: If you want this for VPN connectivity for your remote clients, please look elsewhere. This is useless for remote VPN clients if you want to use OpenVPN

Pros: the status page in port management says it is full duplex gigabit .

Cons: but speed tests show massive loss of throughput. usually i get 65 down 35 up .with this gateway i get 10/10 .while game play has improved some , video streaming has become tedious

Overall Review: this is on the latest firmware v1.0.1.02 (Feb 20 2014 10:11:51)

Pros: -great design -easy to use interface

Cons: -comes with a Cat5 cable, not an E -sometimes does not act as expected concerning port forwarding / dhcp

Overall Review: The setup of this router went perfect, plug and play. The settings side of things was a bit trickier. Although I had had everything working, it was soon discovered that I couldn't get the ports to forward correctly. After searching the net, I finally found some help from someone on the LinkSys forums. We got it working after about half an hour on Skype. Since then, I've had one instance where the ports did not forward correctly, and the DHCP status table was not showing a live list of clients, regardless of how many times I've clicked refresh. The machine showed that it was connected an had the static IP that I gave it, but nothing in the router. Again, this is a one time instance so far. The firewall appears to work perfectly, and acts exactly as I've asked it to. I would buy this product again, and would recommend it to future purchasers, but beware you need at least a moderate level of network experience to get this up and running properly!!!! PS. I saw some complaining about network speeds. I have no problem getting the advertised speed from my ISP and throughout the network. Although I did buy and use all Cat5E cables, not what's included.

Pros: Technically it succeeds at routing bits across a network. Admin interface is fast.

Cons: Terribly slow! When connected directly to modem I get about 60 down. When connected to router I could never get above 20. Router has terrible subnet masks. Call C networks only so each network can only have 250ish IP addresses

Overall Review: I thought a lot of these bad reviews may have been from people that did not know how to setup a network. I was wrong. Avoid this thing like the plague!

Pros: Very nice web interface for an advanced router, great feature set at a good price

Cons: IPsec site-to-site (gateway-to-gateway) connections work for a little while and then completely disable the WAN connection until you reboot the device. I've tested this on an ISA 2006 setup as well as a TMG 2010 SP2 w/ Rollup 4 setup that is as up-to-date as it gets on an up-to-date Windows Server 2008 R2 server. When connecting the IPsec tunnel to either of these servers, it will crash the Linksys after a little while. The logs on the device show nothing, spoke with tech support...no help either. This was previously working on a Cisco ASA tunnel. I even had the ISP update their hardware with the latest firmware and still no luck. The Linksys has firmware 1.0.1.01.

Overall Review: Would be nice...if it worked properly.

Pros: Works excellent with a Linksys switch and room to grow.

Cons: None