Back in January I purchased an expensive Cisco 871 router that keeps my home network attached to the office network over a VPN. I bought Cisco because I had some bad experiences with cheap networking hardware and knew that my job would soon rely on a VPN connection. I've been using it for a few months now and have had the strangest problems. When I access JIRA, Confluence and CollabNet's Scarab issue tracker over the VPN I am unable to click buttons that submit an HTML form. The browser spins forever and eventually times out. In Confluence I am unable to switch to wiki view or preview mode when editing a page. I had these problems using Firefox 2 and 3 on Linux, Solaris, and Windows XP. IE6 and IE7 didn't work either. Also, I was unable to do subversion commits. When I tried from my Windows Vista computer, *everything* worked perfectly.

Our network administrator was certain that there was nothing wrong with the Cisco router or configuration. A few weeks ago I brought all of my computers to the office and plugged them directly into the network. Everything worked great on all computers! Today I set up a new Linksys router with a built in VPN client feature. Now all of my problems are gone! Our network administrator is speechless.

Another problem I had with the Cisco is that I could not access my own website using the external web address. The server is hosted behind the firewall and accessed through a port forward. Our network admin set up the proper routes etc. to make it work, but those changes made the VPN not work. He thinks there is a bug in the firmware. The Linksys router doesn't have this problem and didn't need extra configuration to make it work. The Cisco router requires you pay something like $70/year to get access to firmware updates. Linksys firmware updates are free. The Cisco uses some weird command line interface to configure it and it looks like configuring iptables/ipchains in Linux. There is a graphical GUI on the router but it is basic and doesn't understand the changes we made by hand to enable the VPN!

I was very unimpressed with the expensive Cisco, and doubt I'll buy one again. I don't know what the reliability of Linksys is like compared to Cisco, but I know the Linksys user interface is much better and it just works.