best small business router with firewall 2016

I played with most of the firewall distros out there, but I decided to go more basic, more old school: a plain, CLI-only install of Ubuntu Server and a few iptables rules.Īdmittedly, this likely isn't the most practical approach for every reader, but it made sense for me. Why do it the hard wayĪ lot of you are probably muttering, 'right, pfSense, sure.' Some of you might even be thinking about smoothwall or untangle NG. And if today's morphing connectivity landscape leaves you in a similar position, it turns out that both the building and the build are quite fast. Faced with aging hardware and new consumer offerings that didn't meet my needs, I decided to build my own router. And today, there are lots and lots of relatively fast, inexpensive, and (super important!) fully solid-state generic boxes out there.

What's a mercenary sysadmin to do? Well, at its core, anything with two physical network interfaces can be a router. These tend to be long on slick-looking plastic and brightly colored Web interfaces but short on technical features and reliability.

These days, the answer increasingly seems to be wireless routers. Frequently, the old routers dropped speed test results from 9mbps with the old connection to 3mbps or less with the 50mbps connection. These devices didn't just fail to keep up, they fell flat on their faces. Even coax has proved too much for the old ProSafe series. (Note, I am duly thankful for this problem.) As the latest example, a whole bunch of Netgear ProSafe 318G routers failed me for the last time as small businesses have upgraded from 1.5-9mbps traditional T1 connections to 50mbps coax (cable). Rather than replacing a router when it literally stops working, I've needed to act earlier-swapping in new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with increasing Internet speeds available in the area.

Best small business router with firewall 2016