I bought the Zywall 5 with the accelerator card (200+ bucks more and it takes up the wi-fi card slot) as I wanted a more reliable router with extra features (intrusion detection, spam filtering) than your average basic SOHO router. Little known fact, most of the Linksys, D-Link and Netgear 89 - 130 dollar multi-port routers usually have a 133Mhz level specialized "appliance" CPU (usually AMD). And they are fine for what they are but, in reading the forums they tend to burn out after 3 years. Also they don't have enough processing horsepower to handle multiiple VPNs alongside other duties without choking. The Zywall 5 basic unit(I believe) starts as a 266MHZ unit before the accelerator is added which then brings it up to an 800Mhz cpu. (Correct me if you find I am wrong here OK?). I noticed that..and this is odd maybe..my Internet connection seems to run faster with this after my basic Westell 6100 DSL modem that just running the DSL modem alone. I have filtering setup for various attack vectors (worms, trojans, etc) and think the whole subscription idea of IDP , content and Spam protection is great and reasonably priced. The GUI is very workable for me. Yes Cisco stuff is great but in this market niche is VERY and I mean VERY overpriced for what you get. I find this more workable for me. Like the title says a very classy, reliable, semi-pro router. P.S. It's all metal and they give you rack ears (or at least my vendor did).

I do IT support for a small company - under 50 employees.
We have used routers from Cisco, Sonicwall, Netgear, DLink, and linux-based solutions.

We settled on the Zywall routers because:
1) The content filter is inexpensive and reliable.
2) The VPN is rock solid reliable and easy to configure across multiple router brands.
3) It has an intuitive set of screens to configure everything plus an underlying Command Line Interface if you need to look at anything unsupported by the GUI.
4) They are inexpensive yet incredibly reliable. In 1 1/2 years I have NEVER had to reboot this router due to a crash.

Our corporate router is a Zywall 5. We provide Zywall 2 routers to our employees to use as home routers. This has proven to be a reliable and inexpensive way to create a secure and fast corporate network.

At one point we had a problem with employees that would spend their spare time surfing porn sites, gambling sites and inappropriate chat rooms. That is when the Zywall became an obvious choice. The Bluecoat-based content filter has completely stopped employee porn site and gambling site visits. For only $75 per year it is an incredible bargain. And the number of viruses on our network has gone virtually to zero - every one of the viruses we contracted had come from porn sites or gambling sites!

I have used Cisco routers for years. But they are WAY too complicated since they do not have a GUI to configure them. Using Cisco IOS to pound in commands is a throwback to the 1970's. It is incredibly powerful but I do not want to take a class just to configure my router/firewall. The Zywall has proven to be easy to configure but flexible - just what I need for a small office.

We also used Sonicwall routers prior to this Zywall. But I got tired of Sonicwall's perpetual requirements to keep pouring money into their routers. Pay for support, pay for every optional feature - then they would obsolete our product and give us a 'great deal' (an EXPENSIVE deal) on a new product. Never again will we buy Sonicwall - our company will not be a bottomless pit of revenue to Sonicwall ever again.

The linux routers we used were good - but too hard to configure. The Zywall's well thought out screens were just what a part-time IT person needs to figure everything out. The Zywall was by far the easiest router I have ever seen to set up a VPN - kudos to them for an excellent IPSec VPN that just never messes up. Easy to setup up VPN and reliable - just what we needed.

We also used Netgear routers prior to the Zywall. But Netgear simply has severe quality problems with their products. Weird bugs kept cropping up on every product we purchased (about 10 different Netgear products). Their free firmware upgrades frequently added more problems than they solved. So we eventually gave up on all the Netgear products due to the never-ending list of bugs.

Since we started using these Zywall products 1 1/2 years ago, our firewall/router problems have disappeared. Going to Zywall routers has been one of the best decisions we have ever made.

I purchased a Zywall 5 VPN server to replace an older Linux Freeswan solution. It took about a month to set up in my corporate environment, which likely differs greatly from the Zywall's intended configuration.

The Zywall 5 assumes that it is the default gateway to the Internet, and thus lacks the capability of answering ARP requests for its connected VPN clients (which are configured with virtual IP addresses in the same subnet as the LAN). The Linux Freeswan solution could be configured to answer ARP requests for connected VPN clients. Working around this problem required adding an additional network card to the internal LAN firewall, attaching the Zywall to that LAN card, and configuring the internal firewall to forward packets destined to the connected VPN clients directly to the Zywall. This was not as clean as the Linux Freeswan solution, but it worked.

The Zywall 5 supports X.509 VPN certificates, but requires that a certificate authority be set up on a Windows 2000 server to generate the appropriate certificates for the Zywall and VPN clients. This is a bit awkward to accomplish, considering that the same was possible with just a couple command line entries on the Linux Freeswan box.

It is easy to accidentally misconfigure the Zywall, such that the web and telnet interfaces are no longer accessible, requiring a connection with a serial cable to undo the settings. This happened more than once when trying to make the Zywall send packets back to attached VPN clients.

While the Zywall supports up to 10 simultaneous clients, there are severe limitations. Preshared keys cannot be used with road warrior connections (where the client's IP address changes with each connection). X.509 certificates can be used with road warrior connections, but the same client X.509 certificate must be used for all road warriors (this makes it hard to revoke a certificate should a laptop be stolen). The Zywall supports RADIUS authentication in addition to certificates, so that somewhat resolves the need to share certificates. Multiple road warriors can simultaneous connect using the same VPN rule configured in the Zywall.

The Zywall at my site sits behind an external routing firewall. Some of the Zywall's NAT features appear to be buggy in this configuration, directing return VPN packets at the external routing firewall, rather than to the connected VPN client's IP address.

Bandwidth limitation capabilities help prevent attached VPN clients on high speed cable or DSL connections from completely saturating the corporate Internet connection.

Based on my experience with configuring Linux IPTABLES firewalls on the Freeswan box, the firewall on the Zywall is a challenge to set up correctly. Instead of referring to the encrypted network interface connection as IPSEC0 as on the Freeswan box, the Zywall uses verbose descriptions such as (LAN to LAN / Zywall), (LAN to WAN), (LAN to DMZ), (WAN to LAN), (WAN to WAN / Zywall), (WAN to DMZ), (DMZ to LAN), (DMZ to WAN), and (DMZ to DMZ / Zywall) - determining which setting to use in order to restrict traffic between the corporate LAN and a connected VPN client based on the documentation is difficult (even though the manual is 500+ pages). I had to disable the Zywall's firewall to resolve connectivity issues, and rely on the internal firewall to control traffic destined to connected VPN clients. Maybe if one of the verbose descriptions were labeled (LAN to VPN Client) it would be easier to set up the firewall.

The Zywall 5 supports time synchronization to Internet time servers, which is a required feature to keep the time from rapidly drifting from the correct time. Time synchronization is not always successful, nor does it always use the specified time server.

Once the device's limitations are determined, and it is set up to work around those limitations, the Zywall 5 performs very well for its intended purpose with clients using Safenet SoftRemote VPN software.