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Date: 2001-11-10 02:43 Author: Brent Category: Broadband Routers Manufacturer: Compex Product/Model: NetPassage 15B List Price: $139 Online Price: $90.95 @ Buy.com

Security:

The first thing I had to check is the security of the firewall on this router.  Everyone these days is very concerned with security; hackers  are very aggressive and can cause serious damage to your infrastructure, the one thing you want to be sure of is that no one can get in (or out) of your network to cause trouble. This router does come with a built in hardware Firewall.  Some routers have what's called a DMZ which allows you to place one computer out of the Firewall protection, such as if you are running a server. However this router does not have that feature, instead it's Port Forwarding capabilities are supposed to take care of all your needs as to what ports need to be forwarded.  Lets see what the security is like with the default settings and nothing port forwarded.

The first program I wanted to try is a program called LeakTest from GRC.com What this program does is attempt to connect to the GRC main server to see how good your firewall is at caching OUTBOUND signals from your computer.  This is important to know because of the threat of SpyWare.  SpyWare in a nutshell are programs running in the background that take information from your computer about the things you do and send it off to a server to collect information about you without your knowledge or consent.  The LeakTest program tests to see whether your firewall is stopping outbound traffic from your PCs.  If it DOES stop it then that means SpyWare is useless on your computers and you are protected with great privacy.  If the LeakTest goes through that means outbound communication can occur and SpyWare, if you have any on your computer, can send it's information to it's servers..  As you can see, this router did NOT pass this test with its default configuration. Keep in mind that some programs use standard ports, and in order to have a functioning Internet connection you will have to open some ports :)

The two open ports, 80 and 23 are used for remote administration and are open by default, meaning the Administration interface is accessible via the WAN port from the Internet. I went and checked on both of these ports in the router under Remote Administration and both have a 0 indicated they should be disabled. However that does not appear to be the case does it. I needed a Second Opinion so I went to DSL Reports and tried their Security Test. However this did not work I got this error: "Sorry your current IP xx.xxx.xx.xxx does not match scan IP." I couldn't figure out the problem so I was not able to run the DSL Reports Security scan. So I went searching on google and found some other free port testing sites, they all showed the same thing that GRC did, however I still am not 100% sure of their validity. So it does look like there is some kind of vulnerability here, I don't know if it's anything major or not, and maybe a firmware upgrade can cure it, but as it stands if you just install the router and use it in your daily routine those ports ARE open.

Test Setup

Main PC	Server
MSI K7T266 Pro	Abit BE6-2
AMD 1.4Ghz Athlon T-Bird (266FSB)	Intel Pentium 3 600E @ 800EB (133FSB)
512MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM	512MB PC133 SDRAM
Western Digital 30GB 7200RPM @ ATA/100	Western Digital 30GB 7200RPM @ ATA/66
3Com 905c TX-NM 10/100 PCI	D-Link 10/100 PCI
Windows XP Professional	Windows 2000 Server SP2

Speed

For my download testing what I did was disconnect my router and plug the cable modem straight into my computer so that there would be nothing in between and downloaded a huge 80MB file from a server that is on a major backbone that I always get the highest speeds from and they are always constant for me.  At downloading without the Router I got a constant 440KB/sec which is the MAX download throughput my line is capped at.  Then I setup the router and did the exact same test with only about a 5 minute period between the test and I still got a constant 440KB/sec my max download cap.  Therefore I can conclude the Router did not slow down my download speed at ALL given all conditions are equal.

Here is a screenshot of my download speed from IE. I also used DU Meter and watched it as the download was going, both times it was hovering around 450KB/sec according to DU Meter.

I then uploaded that same 80MB file to a fast server and used DU Meter to gauge it's upload, this screenshot is WITH the router. Keep in mind my cap is 128kbps on the upload, so apparently I'm hitting that cap quite nicely and the Router isn't slowing me down one bit.

To Test LAN transfer rate speed what I did was take 2 324MB video files and copied them from my Server to my Main PC and then from my Main PC back to my Server and used DU Meter's Stop Watch Feature. Here's the result going from my Server to my Main PC. It took 1min and 48sec to transfer 666.88 MB total with a Max transfer rate of 8.17MB/sec and an average 6.17MB/sec. Not bad at all!

Now this one is going from my Main PC back to my Server, same files, same setup. All I can say is holy crap! I got a maximum transfer rate of 9.34MB/sec and an average of 8.81MB/sec. It took it only 1 minute and 16 seconds. Obviously the router Is NOT a bottleneck here. The bottleneck seems to be my PC's or rather Hard Drive speed and configuration.

 

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