Routing Features

I'm not going to spend a lot of time detailing the 600N's routing features, since there isn't much that you won't find on other current-generation Linksys routers. All of the usual suspects are there, including:

• DHCP, Static, PPPoE, PPTP, L2TP, Telstra Cable WAN types
• Built-in Dynamic DNS clients for TZO and DynDNS
• Static and dynamic routing
• SPI firewall disable, multicast, WAN ping and IDENT filtering and Proxy, Java, ActiveX and Cooking blocking
• IPsec, PPTP and L2TP VPN passthrough (enabled by default)
• Single port forwarding and Port Range forwarding and triggered ports
• HTTPS admin access, remote management (HTTP / HTTPS) enable with IP range restriction and port setting
• Logging with support for Linksys Logviewer recording

I thought the Access Restrictions admin page (Figure 5) was worth a look, since there is a lot going on. You can define only 10 deny or allow-based policies, but each can have its own list of clients that it applies to, as well as a day/time schedule that the restrictions apply. The clients can be specified by a mix of MAC address, IP address and IP address range. Note that only three applications can be blocked per policy.

Figure 5: Access Restrictions

The QoS tab holds the WMM (Wireless MultiMedia) (enabled by default) and Internet Access Priority controls. The latter allows assignment of High, Medium, Normal or Low priority to either specific applications (divided into Application, Online Game and Voice Device groups), physical switch ports or specific MAC addresses. The priority is for uplink (LAN to WAN) traffic only.

Figure 6: QoS Features

Like the Apple Airport Extreme and its single-band sibling the WRT350N, the 600N supports network file sharing if you attach an external USB drive. It's not listed in any of the documentation, but Linksys told me that FAT32 and NTFS formatted drives are supported. They also said they had tested drive sizes up to 750 GB.

Figure 7: Disk Management

I found the controls to be a bit funky, requiring multiple attempts on my part to successfully set up an accessible share from an XP SP2 machine. I was not able to set up a share that didn't pop up a Windows login box, and the Guest account with a NO PASSWORD password didn't work either.

The Windows Workgroup name is fixed at "Linksys" and network browsing was problematic (I kept encountering login pop-ups). So I resorted to accessing shares by IP address that seemed to work to let me set up a mapped drive, which I suspect most users will do.

Tags: 802.11n, Linksys, NAS, Router reviews, WiFi, Wireless Reviews,

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