4. Firewall

The WBR2's firewall features are essentially unchanged but have new interfaces. The Network Address Translation (port forwarding) page (Figure 5) has been slimmed down and now includes the DMZ function. (Here's the screen shot from the previous review if you want to compare.)

Figure 5: Network Address Translation setup

The port forwarding controls themselves have been moved to a pop-up page that's summoned by the Enter NAT table button and are essentially unchanged from the WBR. I've made a few entries in Figure 5 so that you can see what they look like.

The WBR2 has retained the ability to disable NAT and act as a LAN-LAN router and also to handle RIP1 and 2 dynamic routing protocols and set static routes. "Loopback" is still not supported for forwarded ports, and you can now edit - but not temporarily disable - port mappings.

A similar approach of moving the setup controls to a separate screen has been taken with the Packet Filter (access control) screen (Figure 6). (Again here's the screen shot from the previous review if you want to compare.)

Figure 6: Packet filter screen

Once again, the packet filter controls are essentially unchanged and I find them still hard to deal with. For example, each filter can apply only to one or all LAN clients - nothing in between. I'm also surprised that BuffaloTech hasn't added scheduled packet filtering, any sort of content filtering and proxy, Java, Active X , etc. blockers to the WBR2, given that many competing products have them.