SmallNetBuilder

Features and Design Details

The TZW comes in an attractive blue and silver plastic enclosure that has the footprint and height of a typical hardcover novel. All indicator lights are on the front of the box and are bright and viewable from a wide angle. You get Link, 100, and Activity for both the WAN and single Ethernet LAN ports, and On, WiFiSec, and Activity lights for the Wireless LAN. Power and Test lights round out the indicators.

All connectors are on the rear panel, including one each WAN and LAN 10/100 LAN ports, power jack, Command Line Interface (CLI) DB-9M serial port, and two RP-TNC connectors for the antennas. A nice touch is that you can force speed and mode for each port via the admin interface (default is autonegotiate), but on the negative side there's no Normal / Uplink capability for the LAN port - although Sonicwall thoughtfully includes both normal and crossover UTP cables. Note also that there's no documentation included for the CLI on the CD that comes with the TZW or anywhere I looked on Sonicwall's website.

Two minor negatives are that one of the antenna connectors is very close to the power jack and there is no hardware reset switch. You can, however, reset the box from the admin interface.