olivetalks

At work I’m using Symantec SGS 360R as a router, firewall and VPN gateway. SGS 360R network appliance belongs to the same 300 series as SGS 320 and SGS 360. The main differences between these three models are:

• SGS 320 has four LAN ports, one WAN port and no VPN support
• SGS 360 has eight LAN ports, two WAN ports and no VPN support
• SGS 360R is like SGS 360 but wih VPN support

Here’s a video (Flash) which shows differences between these three models in more detail.

SGS 360R comes with 10 client licenses for VPN. That means you can have maximum 10 people using VPN at the same time. Unless you use some other VPN method like OpenVPN for example. The VPN client software is only available for Windows and there are two issues I’ve found during usage. First it doesn’t work when Windows firewall is enabled. Third party firewalls work fine, problem is only with the built-in firewall of Windows XP. The second issue is that after installing the VPN client on a laptop the Remote Desktop functionality on the same laptop stopped working. This has occurred on all the machines where the VPN client was installed. I haven’t had the time to exclude the possibility of the culprit being actually some other application since all the PCs had a very similar set of programs installed on them.

SGS can be easily configured using a web browser. It has multiple security features like SPI firewall, IPSec VPN, intrusion detection and prevention, anti-virus policy enforcement and content filtering. It can also be extended with a wireless card to allow WiFi access.

At this point SGS is a bit old as a product, but it looks like it can be still bought.

A few months ago we started having some additional problems with this router. For example, it would drop connection to Internet from time to time (every couple of weeks or so). I’m actually suspecting that the problem was somewhere outside our office since recently we’ve moved and now the problem is gone (ain’t I the Sherlock). We’re even using both WAN ports for load balancing and redundancy. In one of my previous posts I talked about another router Linksys RVS4000. We bought it because of the intermittent connection loss on SGS. For a week or two the Linksys router was working fine but then it died after a firmware update. It wouldn’t connect to the Internet at all. We still had SGS and I was able to put it back in action in a few minutes. Then I connected the second WAN line and everybody noticed speed improvement on downloads.

So what’s the overall verdict? Symantec SGS 360R works fine. Now with double speed.