D-Link firewall with Linux

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

After years of running Linux as my firewall (reasonably happily, aside
from an occasional crash caused by a defective tape drive), I decided
to buy one of those cheapo firewall boxes.  Candidates were the
Linksys BEFSX41 and the D-Link DI-604 (as per the current PC Magazine
reviews).  The Linksys went back to Microcenter yesterday, after about
3 hours of service--it wouldn't stay up for more than an hour at a
time, before going into a repeated software-reboot cycle.

Bring on the D-Link.  It costs less and runs solid but I have an issue
similar to one raised by someone last October (google for 'named
di-604' in newsgroups).  My caching DNS server gets a whole lot of
lame-server errors and timeouts when I set it up behind this NAT box.
There isn't enough debugging capability in the router for me to figure
this one out.  I'm running 2.18 firmware, which has one other odd bug:
its system time reports wild values, whether NTP is turned on or not.

The DNS errors did not happen with the Linksys, so I'm pretty sure
it's not a problem in the Linux config.

Has anyone experimented with these broadband-router firewall boxes?

Oh, and lest anyone else get suckered in by Linksys' marketing hype:  their
firewall firmware is available ONLY in the BEFSX41 unit.  Packaging for
various other products hints that it's included but it isn't.

-rich