Home > Consumer Reviews > Cisco RV082 8-port 10/100 VPN Router - Dual WAN

Okay, this will be brief and is being posted only as helpful hint rather than an indepth review.

If your speeds are fine when directly connected to your ISP, but are slow or unstable when running through the RV082 try the following:

Under the firewall tab, there is an MTU setting. You MUST take this off of Auto and use the manual setting. In my case the default manual setting of 1500 is what I needed. This solved the incredible slowdown problems I was having - in fact now I have the best speeds I have ever seen on my network.

Thanks to "Lone Stranger" and the Google search in which I found his post for finally providing me with this answer after hours of frustration. No thanks to linksys email support, who was of no use at all.

With all the mediocre reviews here, I was hesitant in buying this router. I bought it anyway because it is the cheapest router around with dual WAN and load balancing. Despite some of the earlier review, I am happy to report that I found everything worked including VPN, firewall, 1 to 1 NAT. And, they all worked fine together with one exception (see below).

But, I did find the router to be very unstable. In the last 2 months of operations, I have had to reset it at least a dozen times. In most cases, it either failed to route, assign DHCP addresses, connect VPN or the web interface failed to respond. And, it always requires a power down cold start. I am beginning to think the reset button on the front is for decoration only.
In the past 3 years, my primary WAN has only failed a handful of times, what good is dual WAN if the router fails more than that in just 2 months.

This doesn't include the hundred of times that I have to reset the unit during configuration. Sometimes, the unit's software will get itself into a knot after you save a configuration. It stills works (as a router) but some of the functions like NAT or VPN won't work correctly. This is very frustrating because you don't know if it is the software bug or wrong configuration. And, of course, there are the typical cases where the unit will completely freeze up after a config save. But, at least you can see it is dead and reset it.

The most disappointing thing I found was the one thing I liked about the router, dual WAN. The router will only keep both WANs up if you have it in auto load balance mode. Otherwise, it will to shut down the 2nd WAN even in manual balance mode. A problem if you want to use the IP address on the 2nd WAN for incoming traffic. The other problem is that the VPN doesn't always work when it is in load balance mode but it works fine in single WAN backup mode.

Bottom line, you get what you paid for and I will not buy this unit again. Definitely not worth the headache of having the whole office scream at you every other day because the Internet is down, again!

Good small business router

Strengths:
Load balanced Internet connection options are great. Decent firewall.

Weaknesses:
VPN is a little complicated to connect to from xp/2000 Client. Have to play with the IPSec settings.

I am using the RV042 and a RV082 to connect an office in the US with an office in East Europe. The VPN is working perfectly.
- Excellent performance.
- Very reliable.

Appearance and initial impression:
I knew when I saw the Cisco stamp on the front then I knew that this was a serious piece of equipment. It arrives in a nice metal casing with mounting hardware. It would have been nice to have all the plugs on the back with the power and the lights up front instead of having lights and e-net plugs on the same side (but this follows in line with most of Cicso switch hardware).

Functionality:
Everything worked just as advertised (granted I have only been using the box for a week). The GUI works just like every other Linksys product and makes setup & maintenance a breeze. Got our VPN tunnel to connect two offices set up effortlessly inside of 5 min using two of these boxes. It truly is a one-in-all box Another reviewer said that firewall had to be disabled, but I believe that it was fixed with my firmware as I had no problems with that. I also like the ability to load balance / failover with two DSL devices (which as a good selling point for the client.)

Summary:
Cool device, I would recommend to anyone needing to bridge two or more (up to 50) offices effortlessly and cheaply.

Disclaimer:
I am an independent IT pro with no affiliation to any hardware/software manfgr. In other words I dont work for LinkSys and I am saying nice things because I really like the box :)

I purchased the RV082 box because it is certified for interoperability test by www.vpnc.org . It seems to be the only one Linksys VPN product that pass the test. I am lucky that I made a right decision.
I set up a VPN Network using RV082 in my main office. One computer use Safenet as a VPN client at Home. Another 5 Computers using Linksys BEFVP41 as the VPN box to connect to RV082 from the Branch Office. They are working together like they were in the same office . I can monitor the VPN connection status from its VPN summary table.
There are also 15 PCs sharing the internet connection in the main office. The performance is really good.
I have not test the dual WAN function yet.
I will test it once my second link is ready.

Recommended!!