I promised James that I'd have this review done by the end of last week, then nuked my file system and blew up my CPU (Athlon's have heatsinks for a good reason). On the plus side this delay has given me an extra week to try and break the ISB.

The ISB Pro800 is a basic router combined with an 8 port 10/100 ethernet switch. The router side of things has a reasonably featureful firewall, including NAT support, and will happily speak PPPoE and handle DHCP. This makes it ideal for uplinking to a cable modem (assuming it has an ethernet port) or for ADSL. Unfortunately it does not support PPPoA so is not a good choice for a UK ADSL user.

Although the price tag may seem a little high it's certainly cheaper and easier than having a dedicated system for internet connection sharing, plus it's an 8 port switch.

Installation: The box contains the unit itself, a length of cat5 cable with RJ45 termination, a serial cable, a manual, a CD, and a quick start guide. The unit is a shade of purple, and has a large collection of LEDs on it. It looks very much like a any switch or hub. The manual is a book with writing in it, and as with most users I have no real desire to read it. The quick start guide looks quite promising - it's remarkably short, and has pictures.

A box of tricks!

Manuals are for wimps

Following the quick start guide! The first step of the guide explains the various possible setups - PPPoE, DHCP, and Static IP.

Step 1

Then it's onto the hardware setup. The instructions are clear, and have pretty pictures - even my mother could follow them! Step 3 is setting up your system to use the ISBs DHCP server. Using it's in built DHCP server rather than setting your own IPs has the massive advantage that gateway and DNS settings are set automatically, making two less things to get set wrong. On rebooting my system I now have internet access through the ISB. Easy :)

Step 2&3

If you didn't pop online immediately then the final step in the quick start guide takes you through changing configuration settings on the ISB using it's rather complete web administration panel.

Step 4

I currently use a Netgear 16 port 10/100 switch and a Linux system for my network, so want to use the ISB as a drop in replacement. The ISB by default uses the IP 192.168.0.1, and allocates IPs by DHCP. My network gateway uses the IP 192.168.1.1 and all IPs are static. Fortunately Nexland have made the ISB extremely configurable, and using the web interface or the serial interface you can change the IP used by the ISB. Disabling DHCP on the LAN interface is also simple through the web interface. Moving all my cables across the the ISB everything's back working without me having to reconfigure any of the systems.

It works!! Pity about my cabling :)

On the security side of things the NAT firewall works well. If you want to run services from systems inside your network you can use the virtual servers functions to forward to those systems.

Various games and communications applications don't like running behind a NAT firewall, but using the special applications settings you can setup port ranges for those applications. There's also provision for blocking access to some protocols for systems on your LAN (eg dropping real audio streams in an office environment to prevent your staff wasting your bandwidth.)

Performance wise there's not much to say - it's capable of routing data at the maximum speed of my cable connection allowing downloads to make use of the full potential of my connection. It also doesn't introduce the severe latency and packet loss often seen from lower quality sharing products. I could paste pages of pings and data transfers but there's absolutely nothing interesting that that would demonstrate. This isn't some magic box that promises to make your web browsing and gaming faster, however if you are currently using a 10Mbit hub you'll find it's quite an improvement if you ever play games over your LAN.

I have now been using the ISB for 3 weeks and so far haven't had any problems with it. It handles NTL's DHCP servers falling over (as they do on a regular basis) far better than my previous setup, and I haven't yet managed to do anything to crash it.

In conclusion the Nexland ISB 800Pro is a capable internet sharing device, with a reasonable price tag. While UK ADSL users may want to stay clear because of its lack of PPPoA support it's a good choice for cable users, and for PPPoE users it's ideal.

Price: $299

Features list:

The back of the box

Pros:
• Easy to set up
• IPSEC support
• backup ISDN/modem support
• supports most Dynamic DNS services

Cons:
• Lack of PPPoA support