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Our trusty FVS318 is now the bottleneck in our new high speed fiber setup. I noticed in another discussion here that you recommend the BR500 as a replacement. But the BR500 doesn't have the eight ports that we need. This is just a very small business, but we have a whole bunch of stuff on our wired network.
We initially installed the firewall/router FVS318 because of all the features and the value for the cost. Is there anything else you can recommend to replace our FVS318? I'm wondering also how necessary a hardware firewall is for our type of operation.
Hmm. It seems that there are a lot of different ways to go at this little upgrade issue.
The modem our fiber service installed is the Arris NVG448B. If I go into the interface for this modem, it shows that there is a firewall enabled - with the usual (but a bit limited) controls such as:
Level Packet Filtering Port Forwarding Port Triggering Static NAT DMZ UPnP Access Control DoS Blocking ALG Passthrough
In addition, I run NOD32 software on all of our workstations. SO, I guess the question is, do I need to spend $$ on a new network firewall device, or can I really just upgrade to a couple of unmanaged Gigabit switches and run them into the existing modem? None of the workstations are on Wifi, only a few portable devices. My inclination is to get a pair of ProSafe GS108's, hook up all of our machines to them, and run the switch outputs to the modem. For a small network with basically one or two users, is this enough firewall protection? I am a web developer by trade, but have been dealing with computer hardware for many years.
