VPN

The 312 will allow PPTP clients on the LAN side to access PPTP servers on the Internet.  You can also set the unit to allow a PPTP server on your LAN to be accessed from the Internet (see this Application Note). IPSec is not supported at all and the 312 can't function as a VPN endpoint.

The 312 supports the RIP-1, RIP-2M, and RIP-2B routing protocols and you can set the unit to send only, receive only or do both with its routing information.  You can also set up to 8 static routes and also tell the 312 to not include a route in its RIP broadcasts. You can't specify Multicast protocols in a route.  This will probably be supported in future firmware, as it is in the 3.20 firmware for the 310 and 314 routers. These features make it easy to incorporate the 312 into larger networks with multiple routers.

Logging with the 312 is a mixed bag.  It logs System events (connections, configuration changes, Admin logins) and Firewall activity,  but there is not a unified logging screen in the PNC where you can see all activity.  Instead, you need to open the Firewall PNC to see the Firewall log and the Advanced PNC to see the system logs.

If you have a system that supports the UNIX syslog feature, the 312 will log activity to it.  (Go here for information on obtaining Windows and MacOs syslog clients.)  However, I could not get anything to show up on the free 3Com syslog client that I used (it worked just fine with another product), so I couldn't tell whether both logs are sent to syslog.

The Dynamic DNS client support found in the 310 and 314's V3.20 firmware isn't included, but will probably be added in future firmware.

I found speed to be in line with most recently designed routers. Here are throughput results, using the File Transfer method:

Since I've started to use netIQ's (formerly Ganymede) free QCheck utility for my wireless speed tests, I thought I'd give it a shot with the 312.

(Details of how we tested can be found here.)

Comment: The UDP Streaming test is fairly sensitive to the data rate used.  I found that dropping the rate to about 0.3Mbps yielded virtually no data loss.

Missing in action

As jam-packed with features as the 312 is, there's still more work to do  Here's what the 312 doesn't do:

• filter content

• control user access by time period, password, or MAC address

• act as a VPN endpoint.

Summary

Although ZyXEL has made a big improvement in the User Interface with the PNC, they still have work to do if their intended market includes home and small office users. These customers typically don't have access to people who have the networking knowledge required to configure the advanced features of this product.  Users of any OS other than Win95, 98, and NT4 are also at a disadvantage, since they won't be able to use the PNC, and won't be able to configure the Firewall.

On the other hand, networking veterans will have plenty to play with in this richly-featured box, which will give them a big bang for their buck... as long as they can figure out how to access all that bang!