EDIT: BILLING ERROR... CORRECTED - Linksys BEFSX41 for $56.78 shipped.

[bupkus]

Found in Amazon Gold Box:
$78.56
-11.78
---------
$66.78

Clicked for more info and there was a MIR for $10.
From 11/10/02 to 01/04/03
Postmarked by: 2/4/03

I opted for Super Saver Free shipping as I'm in no hurry. I hadn't planned on buying it anyway.
BTW, how good are Linksys products? I've got cable.

EDIT: Welcome to the world of online deception. I was under the inpression that "Gold Box Discount" meant that your credit card is charged the Item(s) Subtotal plus shipping & handling MINUS the "Gold Box Discount". How mistaken I was.
Upon later reviewing my "Order Summary" I find that I was not given the "Gold Box Discount".

I have a hard copy showing my first Order Summary with 2 boxes with the first titled Shipping Soon where I was to pay $78.56 w/ free shipping and a second box titled Payment Information where I have a discount for Gold Box Discount of -$11.78 resulting in a Grand Total of $66.78.

A later hard copy of my Order Summary shows 2 boxes again where one titled "Shipped" shows a price of $78.56 and the other "Payment Information" "Paid in full" has the Gold Box Discount deleted.
I have notified Amazon that unless they correct this change I would refuse delivery.
Serves me right for not continuing my patronage of Newegg.com.

EDIT 2: Amazon replied to my complaint and promises a refund for the amount of the GOLD BOX DISCOUNT. See my entry for 1/6/03.

 

[cmetz]

Amazon also has the BEFVP41 for $118.99 and a $20 MIR. The BEFVP41 has a hardware crypto chip (about 5.5Mb/s real world according to dslr) and support for 70 tunnels, while the BEFSX is only software crypto (can't be good with the CPUs they use) and support for 2. If you're using the IPsec encryption, you will be a whole lot happier with the BEFVP than with the BEFSX. If you're not using the encryption, the BEFSR41 should do everything else, is pretty well regarded, and there are often good deals to be had on it.

Linksys's SOHO routers are well regarded and popular. They're supposed to perform well for their class, and there's a very active support forum on dslreports.com with actual Linksys tech folks helping. Obviously, a $50-$100 box is just not on the same level as a $1000+ Cisco router, but if it does everything you need it to do and does it well enough, then the price is certainly right. I have heard from many sources that the AC adapter bricks used by Linksys have a high failure rate, so be aware if your router dies a year from now that it might just be a matter of replacing that. (of course, it may end up being much more cost effective to buy a whole new router than to buy just a brick, unless one of the experts around here knows where to get good AC adapter bricks cheap...).

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: cmetz
Amazon also has the BEFVP41 for $118.99 and a $20 MIR. The BEFVP41 has a hardware crypto chip (about 5.5Mb/s real world according to dslr) and support for 70 tunnels, while the BEFSX is only software crypto (can't be good with the CPUs they use) and support for 2. If you're using the IPsec encryption, you will be a whole lot happier with the BEFVP than with the BEFSX. If you're not using the encryption, the BEFSR41 should do everything else, is pretty well regarded, and there are often good deals to be had on it.

Linksys's SOHO routers are well regarded and popular. They're supposed to perform well for their class, and there's a very active support forum on dslreports.com with actual Linksys tech folks helping. Obviously, a $50-$100 box is just not on the same level as a $1000+ Cisco router, but if it does everything you need it to do and does it well enough, then the price is certainly right. I have heard from many sources that the AC adapter bricks used by Linksys have a high failure rate, so be aware if your router dies a year from now that it might just be a matter of replacing that. (of course, it may end up being much more cost effective to buy a whole new router than to buy just a brick, unless one of the experts around here knows where to get good AC adapter bricks cheap...).

Could you or someone speak to the issue of why (and how) you would want to use "encryption". Sorry, I'm a networking newbie, alas. I picked up 65 feet of CAT5e today and expect to have my 2nd system set up in a matter of weeks and I'll want to share my DSL connection between the two boxes. I have a printer, and maybe a 2nd if it still works (working laserjet and an inkjet that's been sitting almost 2 years).

AFA bricks are concerned, I hate them because they're always on even when you aren't using them... unless you unplug them (argh!), or have them on switched power strips, which I do a LOT! Those suckers run up your power bill if you let them just suck and suck 24/7... I think a lot of companies package their product with bricks instead of incorporating them in their products along with an on/off switch because they don't want to go to the hassle of getting Underwriter Labs to approve them. With a router, however, I can see why you'd want them on all the time. At least one of the devices/computers/etc. that uses a router will be a ways away from it.

I have probably more than a dozen bricks from discarded stuff, found, whatever, sitting in a box. You never know when you will need one, and the specs are usually prominently displayed on the brick. Many times when I need one I find that I already have one with the specs I need.

 

[cmetz]

IPsec gives you two things: encryption and authentication. The "encryption" part gets more mindshare, but the "authentication" part is more valuable in my opinion.

Authentication in this case means that you can control who can get into your "inside" network and who can't. So, for example, if you have an IPsec tunnel between your home and your office, you can send data from your PC on the "inside" of your perimiter to some system "inside" your office, via the public Internet, and be assured that random other people can't. It's not quite as good as having very strong end to end access controls, but it's also a heck of a lot easier to set up, and pretty much drop-in. It's a nasty world out there on the public Internet, and most people don't want to let just anyone access their servers, especially if they're internal corporate servers.

Encryption means that you can control who can read the contents traffic. So, for example, if I am able to set up a sniffer anywhere on the Internet between your router and some other system you're accessing with a cleartext password (i.e., not SSL), then I can sniff your password and now I can impersonate you at my leisure. Or I can read all of your email. Or keep tabs on your web habits. You get the idea. In a business setting, secrets and confidential information have economic value, and so there's a stronger business reason to make it so that random people can't read that information. In a home setting, it's mostly about privacy, but the value isn't as high as it could be because most other sites you would access for personal use aren't places you're going to have an encrypted tunnel to anyway.

As a rough practical guide, you would want to have IPsec VPN capability if you were accessing your business from home or if you are sharing "private" stuff between your home and another similarly equipped home user (i.e., if you want to set up file sharing with some friend across town). Other than these two uses, it probably won't help you (certainly not for everyday web and email Internet use).

On the subject of power bricks, unless they are truly horribly designed, they should only draw a very small amount of power when their load isn't connected and turned on. If you have a brick rated for 12V 1A sitting unconnected, it's not supposed to be using 12W of power, in fact I'd be surprised if it were using more than say 10mW. The main reason why manufacturers do outboard power bricks is money; they can buy the bricks from somebody else ready-built and be done with that whole problem. Power supplies are surprisingly hard problems because they're inherently challenging for reliability (much more likely to fail than the rest of your electronics) while also delivering good electronic performance at a very low cost. If vendors put the power supplies inside an electronic device, it's their problem, and unless it's something they're really good at, they're not going to do as good a job as the companies who do power supplies for the shelf (they either lose reliability or increase the cost too much). The other reasons for the bricks are size (how are you going to fit that power supply inside the Linksys router to begin with? it's almost as much volume as the whole router!), heat (power supplies generate heat, and heat's bad for other components), and yes, electrical certification/safety (again, make it somebody else's problem).

The upshot -- in theory -- of having power bricks is that if they fail, you can just replace them. The problem is that in practice the replacement power bricks are expensive, far more so than when they're bought by the OEM, and so it's often not worth it to replace the brick when you can get the whole package all over again for a little bit more. I have that happen to me all the time.

In the case of Linksys, the comment I saw on dslreports and whole-heartedly agree with is that they could probably spend $0.50 - $1.00 more in cost of goods and buy better bricks from some other supplier that wouldn't fail nearly as often. Yes, that's a lot of money on their scale, but compare it with warranty costs and it's not so much, and then think about customer happiness. A little bit of money up front that keeps the customer from having a bad experience is probably money well spent...

 

[Muse]

Thanks cmetz, for the patient and thoughtful perspective on Internet security, tunnels, etc. I do access the network at one of my employer's clients and use Checkpoint VPN authentication. Hopefully it will still work when I rebuild my system this coming week. It wasn't working with Win2000 SP3, when I tried, but by now they've probably developed a solution. Will see. Of course, that Checkpoint VPN client software I'm running is no use to me except when I connect to my client's network. I guess I'll have to do further research on what router to get and whether or not I'll continue to run Zonealarm.

I've tested most all the bricks I use and there are around 7 or 8, I think. You must use them a lot more than I do because I've never had one fail, unless I'm mistaken. I put together a DIY power-usage tester with a digital multimeter, a couple banana plugs I spliced onto one end of a 6' two-wire detour, the other end of which is soldered onto the middle of one of the wires of an extension cord. Very simple and effective. What I found is that the bricks use around 40% of the rated draw even when not being used. I don't think I tested them in use, actually. I should have because I'm sure they draw more when used, or I suppose so. It's not insignificant on a 24/7 basis. I always flip off a power strip when I turn off my computer, for instance. There's 3 bricks that get turned off when I do: 1 for my DSL modem, 1 for my scanner and 1 for my VHS tape rewinder. I bought that rewinder to help insure that I wouldn't have to get my expensive VCRs repaired. When I woke up to the fact that the brick was continuously using power, I measured the continual draw and did some calculations. I hadn't used the rewinder in over 10 years (!) and realized that the cost of the electricity used would easily have paid the cost of having a VCR repaired! Over $100.

Your reasoning seems very sound in your analysis of why bricks are so often used. The heat issue, especially. I never throw them away. I've seen them selling at the local flea market where they are heaped in boxes. Probably a good way to find one cheap, if need be. I'd check there before shopping for a new router, etc. if it's brick going bad was the only problem.

 

[cmetz]

The BEFSX and BEFVP should be able to interoperate with Checkpoint's VPN, but it will probably require you to have them do policy set up on their end to allow you to use pre-shared IKE keys. Most of the commercial firewall VPN solutions I've seen have a semi-proprietary setup to give you username/password authentication in IKE and that's what companies often like to deploy. It all comes down to how flexible their IT folks are. A quick web search should tell you how to set up the BEFVP with Checkpoint; when I was doing some research on them it seemed like there were a lot of how-to guides telling you how to get it to work with arbitrary other IPsec VPN implementations. This is a good thing, for those who just want to get it working and don't care to get into the details. The BEFSX should be almost the same to configure, only it won't encrypt nearly as fast.

On the subject of bricks, I'm surprised by your observations of idle draw, I'll have to measure it. I'll do some research and start a thread on some other forum (happy to talk more about bricks, but it's probably bad to do so on hot deals...).

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: cmetz
The BEFSX and BEFVP should be able to interoperate with Checkpoint's VPN, but it will probably require you to have them do policy set up on their end to allow you to use pre-shared IKE keys. Most of the commercial firewall VPN solutions I've seen have a semi-proprietary setup to give you username/password authentication in IKE and that's what companies often like to deploy. It all comes down to how flexible their IT folks are. A quick web search should tell you how to set up the BEFVP with Checkpoint; when I was doing some research on them it seemed like there were a lot of how-to guides telling you how to get it to work with arbitrary other IPsec VPN implementations. This is a good thing, for those who just want to get it working and don't care to get into the details. The BEFSX should be almost the same to configure, only it won't encrypt nearly as fast.

On the subject of bricks, I'm surprised by your observations of idle draw, I'll have to measure it. I'll do some research and start a thread on some other forum (happy to talk more about bricks, but it's probably bad to do so on hot deals...).

So you think I might do OK to get a BEFSX or BEFVP, I take it. I'll keep my eyes open. I still need a monitor before my 2nd system goes from the drawing boards into service. I've got all the other parts, though, and it's basically assembled and working except that I'm using basically a 12" B&W monitor. I'm deciding and shoping for a 21".

The client company whose network I assess through Checkpoint VPN and PCAnywhere has little to no expertise. However, the company I actually work for supplies their expertise, and they have plenty of it. The only problem is they set things up and then left - they aren't on site. It's not a biggie. I'm sure I can get things set up and working again. I do have a username and password that I have to enter each time I authenticate for the VPN software to be happy (basically, every time I boot!). Fortunately, I run a macro software that lets me take care of that with my mouse. I have a feeling I'll have to fetch an updated version of the VPN client that works with SP3. The one I'm running doesn't, I suspect. Or maybe it was just something about my system. Will see.

Are you suggesting that my connection with the client network might work faster if I am using the BEFVP? If so, it may well be worth it. Right now I get unbelieavably fast downloads from the network (no router, just my DSL connection). I can download around 200 MB of data in 5 minutes. To me that seems pretty fast.

If you start a brick thread, I hope you drop a note in this thread so I'll know about it... Thanks! General Hardware?

 

[cmetz]

The VP41 is supposedly about 5.5Mb/s 3DES+SHA1 in practice, which is not by any means huge performance but enough for most SOHO users (i.e., if you have 7.1/768k ADSL, it's not enough, but for most cable/DSL users it'll be enough). I was not able to find performance numbers for the BEFSX41, but if you just think about it for a moment, it's gotta be roughly an order of magnitude slower going from hardware to software (remember that the CPU in those things is NOT that fast, it can't even route/PAT traffic at 10Mb/s, then you're adding crypto?). My conclusion was that if you really used the IPsec capability a lot, you were likely to have an actual performance bottleneck on the BEFSX and not be real happy with it. If you only use it occasionally / lightly, or if you have one of the very low end connection speeds, then it's probably fine. If you don't use IPsec at all and just want more features, then go ahead, it doesn't matter.

Also, when I did some web research, I found that there were just way more users of the BEFVP41 than of the BEFSX41. Yes, the herd mentality can lead you right off the cliff, but I figure that popularity does sometimes matter, for example in terms of future support, and also suggesting that users are keeping the VP. All that said, some of my local B&M stores carry the BEFSX41, none carry the BEFVP41, so moving forward it wouldn't surprise me if you see more BEFSX41s in home users' hands.

I certainly don't mean to be down on the original poster's deal, I just want to make sure that people get a box that they're going to be happy with, and point out that there's a very similar good deal available (same place and rebate form, even!) on the higher-end box.

 

[bupkus]

bump

 

[Bowfinger]

Originally posted by: bupkus

[ ... ]
EDIT: Welcome to the world of online deception. I was under the inpression that "Gold Box Discount" meant that your credit card is charged the Item(s) Subtotal plus shipping & handling MINUS the "Gold Box Discount". How mistaken I was.
Upon later reviewing my "Order Summary" I find that I was not given the "Gold Box Discount".

There are so many people (myself included) reporting problems with Amazon billing, I suspect this may be part of their business model instead of mere incompetence. They could make a lot of extra money this way; you know that many people will never notice the overcharge. I boycotted Amazon for two years when they sought to enforce their absurd one-click patent. It may be time to shop elsewhere again.

Unfortunately, I've found similar problems at buy.com. Thank heavens for Newegg for PC components, but are there comparable stores - good service, good selection, and decent prices - for things like electronics, DVDs, books, etc.?

 

[Muse]

There are so many people (myself included) reporting problems with Amazon billing, I suspect this may be part of their business model instead of mere incompetence. They could make a lot of extra money this way; you know that many people will never notice the overcharge. I boycotted Amazon for two years when they sought to enforce their absurd one-click patent. It may be time to shop elsewhere again.

Unfortunately, I've found similar problems at buy.com. Thank heavens for Newegg for PC components, but are there comparable stores - good service, good selection, and decent prices - for things like electronics, DVDs, books, etc.?

I had one order at Amazon.com go bad, and it was for a music CD. The vendor was at magicalmuzic@aol.com, and I never received my CD. After a sufficiently large grace period which exceded a month IIRC, I called my CC company and eventually got my money back. Meantime, I ordered it elsewhere. It was supposed to be a used CD at a reduced price and I wound up buying new. I made the mistake of assuming that since it was through Amazon, it would be OK.

Other than that, I don't recall having any problem in all my online ordering and I've made dozens of orders at this point. I usually research my vendors fairly carefully. If it's computer stuff I go to www.resellerratings.com and if I don't find reasonable assurances that I'm dealing with a resonsible vendor, I look elsewhere. I think you can often tell a lot about a vendor by inspecting their website, but I don't recommend relying on that by any means! Newegg was my first computer online vendor and I've done well with them, but they're in CA and so am I, so I only order from them when I can't get better deals elsewhere. There are many many trustworthy and excellent vendors online, but it's always best to do your homework before ordering. It's not just money - you don't want the aggravation that can arise from a bad deal, and they can go bad in a LOT of ways.

If you are wondering about a vendor you can try Google Groups searches, too, if you can't find a vendor analysis elsewhere. Many Google searches for electronics components, etc. include hits with a list of the vendors where the lowest prices can be found along with reviews of the vendors - very handy. If I see a lot of folks saying "Never order from this company, and here's my horror story...", I look elsewhere.

So far, I've only ordered books online at Amazon and it was OK. DVD's I've had good luck so far and I think all the deals I have found were by virtue of recommendations in this very forum (Hot Deals). This discussion is sort of off topic in this thread, though not in Hot Deals, obviously.

 

[bupkus]

I have just received a reply from Amazon apologizing for their error and promising a refund for the $11.78 to my CC.

...it appears that the Gold Box
discount for the Linksys BEFSX41 EtherFast Cable/DSL Firewall Router
with 4-Port Switch/VPN EndPoint was applied to your order. However,
it was not applied when the item was shipped.

Their reply was on the first working day after my complaint and promises a satisfying conclusion. I will now change the title of this thread once again from DECEPTION to BILLING ERROR; CORRECTED.
I hope I like the product I'm receiving. I never planned on using the VPN feature, just the NAT and firewall. I hope it's as good as other perhaps even cheaper cable routers for those uses.