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The Unit was installed shortly after delivery with the Default Bios. It was firstly configured with very Basic Setting to see how it wound perform with the current ISP speed of 512/256.

After initial setup I had the following question to Tech Support Netgear.

1. What Bios revision should I be currently running.

2. With regard to the RIP setting, the unit has the ability to set to “in”, “out” or “Both In and Out” what does “In” mean – I.E Does that mean transferral of information Downstream and does “Out” mean transmitting information External to the unit.

The response to the first question was I should be running version 2.x Firmware and he could not answer my second question and referred it to a senior Analyst for an answer in which after a period of over 4 weeks still and at present cannot be answered by Tech Support

When I attempted to down load Firmware version 2.x, the appropriate warning were evident on the website as this firmware revision was still BETA, and as I do not ever permit running BETA firmware in a production environment, in principal; it was not loaded.

My ISP changed to a connection speed of 15000/256 and then the unit started to have problems. At this stage I had hoped to use the unit as functionally designed to include and Block Inbound services of my choice.

I installed firmware revision 1.3 of the netgear and the following problems were evident and advised to Netgear via the support request site.

1. IF the number of firewall rules approached 50 the user interface suffers from “Stack Overflow” and the help screen on the right hand side of the user interface completely disappears as the error ………setup.cgi/ NO CACHE and further modifications are not possible as there is insufficient RAM allocated to the user interface to write back to the unit.

2. When a ISP connection was provided to the unit in the conditions above the unit would start to exhibit more frequent stack overflow error errors and I assume the additional overhead of comms traffic, when a connection was applied, made it impossible for the unit to be further configured via the user interface sand maintain a comms connection.

Operationally the unit then exhibited the following errors in relation to FTP traffic, indeed it became impossible to perform ANY FTP transaction as I assume the unit was so bust knocking back invalid traffic that it could not also observe performing 2 tasks; namely observing the configured firewall rules AND maintaining comms connection PPoE.

The unit would also completely fail to obtain a valid IP when an application was open on the users PC’s and for what ever reason the power was terminated to the unit and then reinstated 5 minutes later.

The presence of an application being open and requesting traffic when the unit was initiated is IMPOSSIBLE for the unit to achieve, mainly due to a lack in traffic shaping facility, which in not apparent in the units functional design.

After further reading about advances? To firmware, I decided to upgrade the unit to version 1.50 the most recent of NON BETA firmware available for the unit.

Despite the unit NOT having to deal with maintaining a comms connection, I attempted to log into the unit with NO additional software firewalls and or restriction running to prevent the Unit from both having to perform 2 tasks, comms and user change via the interface; and being restrained by software conditions.

I was unable to log into the unit, however the unit did respond to my initial login attempt be asking for the admin user logon and MY password. After 45 minutes the unit displayed on the screen “Loading configuration file…please wait”; and I observed some packets were sent to the unit and some did come back, however at a trickle.

I reset the unit to factory defaults as my configuration file was saved and I was hopeful that be upgrading the unit’s firmware to version 1.50 and then applying my configuration file it may be able to do this.

I was unable to log into the unit at all, despite the unit acknowledging that the now password of “password” was accepted by the unit to log in.

I then rang Tech Support, and the first question I was asked was, “Is this going to be quick as there are many calls waiting”. I quickly stated my problems and was guided by the support technician to try different ways of logging into the unit all which were not accepted by the unit and I was still not able to log into the unit at factory defaults.

One of the most perplexing tests the support technician asked my to perform was to see if I could “ping the unit” which I was happy to do, however this is a firewall unit, the use of a diagnostic ping to the unit will always fail; however the technician seemed to be lost on this reason.

I requested a RA – return authority, but was only told they did RMA – return maintenance authority numbers. In other words we only relace the unit with a new one if faulty but do not refund.

I now, as advised by Netgear to present the Unit back to you for refund under the Netgear RMA.

I felt sorry to put my vendor in the middle of things, as what it seems, however if you want to sell, outrageously defective hardware; either by function design, or availability of adequate responsive Technical Support which as you can see is most defective if not be lack of understanding of the Support Staff basic understanding of their own product; there lies some responsibility on your behalf in selling reputable product and knowledge of inadequate functional design and support.

In closing I draw your attention to the warranty card enclosed, and in particularly the sentence “Should the product fail……” and “Replacement products may be refurbished…”, Together there statements would seem to indicate that under NO circumstances is the full price of the product every refunded, and even If I had been able to forward the unit to you within vendor guidelines for refund; the unit will never be refunded either to you.

Under Australian Law I do not know if this warranty would ever stand up to an Australian Consumers warranty of defective goods, and in my simple mind is nothing more than a small shop displaying a sign “Choose carefully, as we do not refund, only exchange goods!

My previous DSL modem/firewall/router was plagued by buggy software and frequent crashes requiring constant reboots of the device. When I purchased the DG834, I was hoping that it was a superior product, and I was not disappointed.

Setup really was simple. I had it up and running in under three minutes! It correctly detected my DSL settings and auto-configured itself mostly. I of course changed the default password (as everyone should) and that was it.

Some nice features are the ability to block sites that you don’t want users on your network to be able to visit (which is a big plus for me), and you can have it block sites by keyword, IP address or domain name, a very handle feature which my previous device lacked.

Also, being able to have the network/router logs and alerts e-mailed to you on a regular basis or when certain conditions are met (such as a blocked site that someone tried to access) is another huge plus.

From a security standpoint the DG834 is rock solid. I tested the firewall using a very extensive port scan, and it had all the ports stealthed out of the box and correctly logged the port-scan in it’s internal log. Very impressive!

Overall the DG834 is a fantastic purchase, well worth the price. It has shown itself to be a very stable, reliable and user-friendly modem/firewall/router that I am very pleased with.