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ZyXEL Prestige 310
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The Good Cable modems authenticate by a couple of different means. One of the more popular methods is to use the hardware address of a network card in your computer to identify the user to the network. This way, passwords don't have to be sent and the process appears to be transparent to the user. What the ZyXEL P310 can do, is grab this address from a computer, and then pass this ID to the network authenticator. There are other methods as well, and the ZyXEL does address those. It has support for hardware authentication, But wait, there's more. The ZyXEL has a very configurable on-board firewall. The firewall allows you to assign up to 12 rules per filter, and up to 6 filters, for a total of 72 rules. You can apply as many as 24 rules to a single port (i.e. port 80 or http access.) When you set up a filter, you are telling the router what to do with packets under what conditions. Sound complicated? It can be, and that's the major problem I see with this router, but I'll come back to that. The ability to customize is also this routers greatest strength. Within it's price class, it's very hard to name any other router that has all the potential of the P310. This is because the firewall will let you open ports individually, so that if you want to run a particular service, you can. You can also have the firewall deliberately stop all undesireable types of traffic along unusual or rarely used ports or to certain machines. The firewall will also let you open multiple public servers (known as DMZ servers), so that you could have your own email, web servers, databases or other publicly accessible servers (like a game server maybe?) all running across the router at the same time. Nice. The P310 will do your inside addressing for you, if you'd like. Dynamic Host Control Protocol, or DHCP, is the assignment of network addresses as needed. As devices come onto or leave the network, they're assigned an address from a pool of numbers. Should they leave the network for a The router also does Network Address Translation, or NAT. NAT, allows you to use private addresses inside of your network, and public addresses on the outside. This adds a layer of security, and standing alone or better yet combined with the built-in firewall, can prevent intrusions into your network. The P310 combines this with something ZyXEL calls SUA or "Single User Account". SUA, allows multiple inside addresses, to be mapped to one public address. It may sound complicated, but the bottom line is that you can use a bunch of computers inside your network, but they'll all be seen as coming from the one public address given to you by your xDSL or cable company. This even works across DHCP! The router will also let you group computers. This is called subnetting, and the router allows you to subnet into three groups, each consisting of up to 253 devices, for a total of 759 potential addresses/devices. You can use this in conjunction with the firewall to keep certain devices from ever talking to the internet, or each other if you'd like. You can do it by function, location, or department, it's entirely up to you. Thought we were done? Think again! One VERY cool feature of this router is that the P310 will let you run Dynamic DNS, which is a way of associating a domain name, like www.whatever.com, with a dynamically addressed system. A DDNS server will "hold" an ip number for whatever.com, and then authenticates you when you log on, and then re-routes all requests for whatever.com to your new dynamic address. If you go away and come back later with a different ID, you just re-authenticate, and requests are redirected to the new address. It's a slick idea, in that it lets folks with dynamic addresses do their own The router can be setup to interface with your office securely via PPTP. Point-To-Point Tunneling Protocol, is a way of setting up an *encrypted* link between you and another site. With PPTP, you can set up a Virtual Private Network, which would allow you to communicate directly with your office LAN, via the internet, very securely. At this point, it will only act as a PPTP VPN gateway with certain French xDSL devices, though it will pass PPTP traffic back and forth using any system. All these features combined could easily cost you upwards of a few thousand dollars on another router, and ZyXEL has done very well to pack so much, into such a small router.
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