I used to own this router. Decent unit, though I had to reboot the thing several times. It died shortly after the warranty expired. I've only had one switch and one router ever fail on me. Both Linksys.
Perhaps just coincidence ... perhaps not.

I've gone through about 6 routers (Linksys, Netgear & Dlink) and this is the first one I've used that's not had to be rebooted frequently. It was a daily problem with some of the others, and I've *never* had a problem with this unit in the year that I've used it.

i used a RV042 for a year and a half, it made a horrible buzzing noise and finally died. it was extremely flaky when it did work. there is no benifit to this model over the typical $50 linksys home router. if someone wants business class features, it is time to move to cisco - a cisco ASA5505 beats the crap out of the RV042 in terms of features and only costs about twice as much - not to mention that they don't randomly die

Why does this and every other site out there keep producing outstanding reviews for routers that are essentially pieces of junk! Please, before blessing this and other routers in the future, give it at least till rev 2 and THEN spend some time reviewing the message boards before even considering publishing your findings.

were you able to connect from the built-in pptp client in mac to the rv042?
also, i wonder if it supports zero config over vpn?

We review products by testing them, not by reading message board comments.

In this case, as the author stated, the product was personally used for 18 months and found to be very stable.

If you take the time to read the reviews on this site, you'll find that our testing is more complete and rigorous than other publications and that we are more critical than complimentary of products.

I had a client with one of these and very poor response on their T-1. Running Ping Plotter through it showed awful packet loss (remember a dropped packet will stall a Web browsing experience dramatically), which probably matches your mysterious throughput results. Swapped it for a WRT54GL (they didn't need the dual WAN ports) and those problems went away. The extra $100 in this case was wasted...

I have yet to read a review yet that you guys wrote where you have had problems with a device. I run an IT company and I run into problems all the time with routers and wireless devices so I don't think your being real and I have a suspicion you are covering up for manufacturers when you do have problems. Devices by Dlink and Linksys has been horrible to get working properly (rebooting or dropping clients or locking up) yet you never have an issue? AMAZING, but you know, your'e not making our life any easier and your not making manufacturers any more honest. I am glad people are posting the problems they have had with these devices to BALLANCE your review and make it more realistic.

I've set up a half a dozen of these over the past couple of years (the last being just over a year ago) and they all work great.

One thing I wish the article would cover, is how to set up the IPSec with quick VPN. That part was totally skipped. I only got IPSec and Quick VPN to work once on the WRV54G wireless VPN router but it was short-lived. Can anybody give an example of how to set up the IPSec with a dynamic address client on the RV042? (as I can't any straight answers to that)
Maybe a future article on this with some examples would be really helpful!

Just to add a few things:

1) Unit runs hot, so keep it well ventilated and clean. (the user with the buzzing noise prob had a defective or dirty fan, overheating the killing the processor)

2) Using load balancing was a better option than WAN failover, as it kept the PPPoE line alive. Also on load balancing, the "failover" was less than 3secs on average. (also allowed for a backup VPN/remote incoming internet line).

3)The last few firmware update that included the PPTP tunnel protocol made my life a hell lot easier, (I'm not an ultra IT geek, so don't bash me) Especially usefully since I used to use Server 2003's PPTP, and if the server was down, remote access to network was gone! (the windows vpn client setup requries nothing more than server address/username/password to connect. other advance setting optional)

4) Latest firmware 1.3.9 "supports the change of the CPU from IXP425BB to IXP425ABB."... ??? better performance???

5)QuickVPN won't work with windows firewall on!

I did run in to a couple of firmware glitches recently (both involving internet over PPPoE, and getting the internet constantly cut off. First one was fixed just by re-flashing the firmware, which was already the latest one.) Another one recently with the same problem, but I have not the chance to re-flash it.

For ppl who found no benefit over the typical $50 router... that's because you don't by the because of "performance" rather it's features like VPN, Dual WAN, static host, logging, etc... and it has better firmware update support than the the typical "home" models.

Also, I don't find the lack of Gigabit a problem since It's better to put the whole network on a separate Gigabit switch anyway.. so the whole network won't go down b/c of a glitch on the router.

Cisco ASA5505 for "about" twice the cost...haha... why don't you sell me one!

I recommend and bought two of these for my company, and both are unusable after two years. They can't keep the time because the battery in the router died after two years, and you have to send it back to factory to replace it. I open it up, and there are no user replaceable battery inside. I got some flak from my boss about this, and we are not sending it back to Linksys. We replace them with some cheap Netgear router, which has much less features, but less headache.

You must not be a regular reader of our reviews. How about this one?
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com...26843/51/

or any of our reviews or coverage of draft 11n wireless products?

We cover up for NO manufacturer and, in fact, have had both manufacturers you mentioned refuse to provide product to us in the past due to less-than-positive reviews.

Get your facts straight before making unfounded accusations.

I have 2 RV042 routers. Due to the inability to maintain and reconnect dropped tunnel connections, these have been paperweights since purchased in February '07. Linksys just released new firmware (1.3.9) to correct a known problem regarding tunnel re-key negotiation. I haven't had the time to test it but hope it fixes my paperweights.

I believe all hardware reviews need to be taken with a grain of salt as sometimes those model that are tested and reviewed might differ in the actual one that you might get from stores. I think we should give the reviewer some slack.

here is your cisco asa5505 that costs roughly twice as much as a RV042

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833120135

RV042 = $180 from CDW
ASA5505 = $390 from CDW

it is 2.16 times the cost


for that amount of cost, you get a much better device... SOHO products may have attractive prices and have all kinds of neat features, but for rock solid stability / reliability it is time to move to business class

i think i would laugh out loud if i went to a business's network rack and saw a linksys humming away in there... some things just don't belong in some places

bringing me back to my original point... if you want a cheap, easy device then go for a $50 linksys. if you want a business class device, then look at the big names like cisco. you are wasting your time and money in the long run with stuff like RV042s

We take great care to ensure that we test "untweaked" product. We test only with the latest publicly-released firmware and drivers and reset all product to factory defaults before test.

We also open all product and look for obvious signs of component substitution.

That said, the relatively short time that we spend with products will *never* reveal all problems that arise in real-world use.

Very interesting article.
If I may suggest one more test, please verify also the IPSec throughput performance.
Cisco routers/firewalls doing IPSec VPN processing in software cannot support more than one megabit per second of traffic. Above this traffic level a dedicated IPSec hardware accelerator is a must (of course, it increases the price).
I work with Cisco routers everyday, and I found the “official” Cisco IPSec performance numbers to be misleading (“marketing numbers”, far from real world results).
For example, let’s say Cisco claims that a router supports 100 Mbps of IPSec traffic. This number is one-way traffic. The real traffic is bidirectional, so the 100 Mbps has to be divided to two.
IPSec encryptor performance is limited by the number of packets per second it can process, not bits per second. The performance in bits per second = (nr of packets per second) x (size of packet). Of course, Cisco uses the largest packet size available to get the best performance in bits per second, not small packets or mixed traffic.
With mixed traffic, the mighty 100 Mbps throughput of IPSec VPN traffic comes down to approximately 25 Mbps of real-world traffic.

The "VPN" speeds in Table 1 are IPsec. The table has been clarified to indicate this.

Clicking the link to the slide show on the review page links to RVS4000 not RV042

I do believe some people are being superficially critical for nothing in the comments on this device.

One thing that IS rather annoying is that the RV042 [at least] does seem to have a fundamental design problem. The buzzing noise issue, usually developing after a few months of use, almost always leads to a dead device- usually a bit after the 1 year runs out. I had this happen myself. After speaking with Linksys 800 support, it's obvious they know it too. Didn't need to ask me anything once I described the buzzing noise and DIAG led problem indicator- kept replying with "you need to buy a new unit" even though I wanted to know where I could send it for non-warranty repair. [No, I wasn't going to send it for repair because it would be cheaper to buy something new].

It would have been cheaper to buy the 8 port model, and get the 3 year warranty for free.

Oops. Sorry. Fixed.

Dear sir:

For you didn't mention your WAN1 connection mode, we have set up two test cases to replicate the problem.
In the first case, we selected smart link backup mode and WAN1 was PPPoE, WAN2 was DHCP.
We choose keep alive mode for WAN1. WAN1 was connected with an ISP cable on a hub.
Remove ISP cable and Router switched to WAN2 in a few seconds. Reconnect ISP cable and We observed that
Router switched back to WAN1 automatically.
In the second case, all settings were the same with the first case except we choose connect on demand for WAN1.
The result was the same as the first case.
Our RV042 firmware version was v.1.3.9.

If you have any questions or information, please let us know.

Curious about one point : this review states that RV042 speed is 54Mb/seb, whereas the big brother rv082 is rated 22 MB/sec on the same site.

What's the heck ?

The RV082 review was done over three years ago. Newer firmware may have improved performance.

Hey,
did anyone test the performance of this router in a G2G VPN scenario? I'm quite far from getting the performance numbers seen in the test...

Using the same server, same file and same client I get 310KB/s when connecting via a port forwarded SFTP connection and 170-175KB/s via the VPN. To double-check I've tried downloading from three locations (all using the same ISP, and same subscription) and I consistently reach the maximum allowed line speed when I connect directly and the same 170-175KB/s when I connect via the VPN...

My old Netgear FVS124G was able to reach the same speed upstream whether via the VPN or not. I also have to add that there's no other traffic on that G2G link...

Any clues? Thanks, Robert

Hi Doug and thanks for your feedback - sorry about the dead router :(

I will try to figure out the disparity in G2G vs. C2G performance by testing with a VPN client connection and I'll post here my findings. Maybe it's got something to do with my settings but since I have three RV042s at three different locations I should be able to single out any disparity.

TBH this performance issue is a bit surprising since I'm otherwise very satisfied with the RV042 both in terms of stability (turned on, configured and never rebooted since) and download/upload performance: I'm getting my line's 25Mbps / 2.5Mbps most of the time on fast sites or mirrors.

Kind regards,
Robert

I've got both a netgear FVS124G and an RV042 (both in production for two years now) and I wouldn't call them all that similar. The netgear would *not* fail over for me (and I had an ISP with regular outages), and neither netgear nor the retailer would take it back, making it an expensive gigabit switch. Which the RV042 isn't capable of being. The RV042 also does PPTP (which works trivially with both macs and iPhones), whereas the FVS124G just does IPSEC, which I couldn't get working with either a mac or an iPhone.
Finally, the RV042 lets you use the second WAN port as a DMZ subnet, which would set the thing apart from the run-of-the mill small office router like the netgear - except all indications are that it just doesn't work. I was disappointed to see that you didn't cover that functionality in your review.