SmallNetBuilder

Routing Features

The 160NL implements the standard Linksys router feature set that includes:

• 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
• Access Restrictions with 10 deny or allow-based policies, each with its own list of clients and day/time schedule
• Uplink (LAN to WAN) only QoS with High, Medium, Normal or Low Priority that can be applied to specific applications (divided into Application, Online Game and Voice Device groups), physical switch ports or specific MAC addresses.
• WMM (Wireless MultiMedia) (enabled by default)

If you need further details, check the WRT600N review and its slideshow.

Since I haven't documented the Storage Link features in previous reviews, here are the screens. The Disk screen (Figure 4) is where you mount and dismount the USB drive, format it (FAT32) and create shares.

Figure 4: Storage Link Disk screen

I found the share creation process (Figure 5) somewhat confusing and won't try to untangle it here. I'll just say it took a couple of tries and a reformat of the USB drive before I was able to successfully create a share with read/write permissions and access it to perform storage performance tests.

Figure 5: Storage Link Share creation screen

Note the reference to twonkymedia.db in Figure 5, which apparently is the UPnP AV media server that Cisco has bundled in. I tried to access the Twonkymedia admin directly on port 9000, but got a red screen with only an Access is restricted to MediaServer configuration! message. The Media Server controls are shown in Figure 6. I ran a quick check and it didn't look like the server supports iTunes.

Figure 6: Media Server controls

Figure 7 shows the last Storage page, Administration, where you can add and edit Users and Groups and set the server name and Windows Workgroup.

Figure 7: Storage Admin screen

I ran a quick performance check by plugging in a 2.5" USB drive and running iozone and the Vista SP1 filecopy test from my NAS test suite. I was not surprised at all to find that the Vista filecopy showed around 7 MB/s write and read and slightly less with iozone after cache effects were ignored. This is notably better than the 4 to 5 MB/s that I measured for the Storage Link in the WRT350N and 600N, but still nothing to write home about (or back up large files with).