4. What's Happening

• U.S. Robotics Secure...
• • ElectronicsPLUS
  • $151.99
• • CompUPlus
  • $153.00

The main mechanism for getting an overview of the 8200's setup is its Home / Network Map page shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Network Map
(click on the image for a full-sized view)

At first I thought this was just a cutesy way to show what's going on in the router. But most of what you see is clickable and takes you to a screen for administering that section of the product.

An even nicer touch is the information you see for the client PUTTI (no cracks about the client names please...). Each client shows a list of any ports that are opened it. In addition to ports specifically opened by using the DMZ or Local Servers features, ports automatically opened by UPnP NAT Traversal are also shown! I'd still prefer to see products ask permission before automatically opening ports, but at least the 8200 shows some indication of the lessened security provided courtesy of UPnP NAT Traversal.

In the beginning, I really liked the Network Map and the overall interface. But, after my few days with the 8200, I found I grew to like the interface less. I found myself hunting around to get back to particular configuration pages, and just happening to stumble across others. Setting up firewall features was tedious, especially with no way to assign groups of LAN clients to the same rule sets.