Linksys BEFSR41 -> BEFSX41 . worth upgrading?

[mineva]

Hello all,

I have brought a linksys BEFSR41 a year ago mainly for sharing internet connection among the 2 desktops we had in our office. Both had sygate 5.5 installed along with avast 4.5 pro installed.
Recently our boss has expressed his concern for additional safety, where he thinks it would be wise to have a hardware firewall among the network.

Upon doing some research, the BEFSX41 seems to be a nice choice but upon reading various reader reviews it does not seem to have a good rating. So my concern would be is the BEFSX41 a good choice? or are there better products out there?

[ammo]

Well, there's not much diffrence between these two; the biggest one would be the VPN endpoint capability, which I suspect you don't really need since you haven't even mentionned it.

Do you still only have to computers in your office? What kind of use to you make of your internet connection?

If I were you, I'd probaly just make sure that your Windows are patched and that AVs are up to date and (unless you're doing something fancy like hosting servers...) the basic NAT and filtering in the BEFSR41 should be plenty... (Not to mention that you also run personnal software firewalls on both machines).

Oh, also, banning Internet Explorer and replacing it with firefox would be much higher on my priority list than getting a fancier firewall.


Ammo

PS: Sorry if some sentences don't quite make sense, it's way past (what should be) my bed time and am quite tired...

[mineva]

Thanks for the reply.

Well, our first and foremost concern is securing our little office network. VPN from what
I read is too fancy for us so I would think we have little use of this function.

Both our work stations has up-to-date patches (SP2) and we don't intend to run servers
of any kind. Basic usage on the workstations would only be receiving e-mail, word processing and broswering.

We have switched to firefox since 0.9 and have never looked back
Plus we like thunderbird a lot more then Outlook express

[utahlanman]

Provided you've disabled remote management on the DSL/Cable router, and you're routinely updating your SyGate firewall & discontinue use of IE (as was just mentioned), I'd see no reason to replace the router. Are you doing any Port redirection or hosting of systems to be accessible from the Internet?

The next step up would probably be something like a NetScreen 5xp or similiar device, but you'd still need a DSL/Cable modem.

[mineva]

Forgot to ask this last time but if we were to share files and printer over our little intranet is the
BEFSR41 good enough?