Since the Barricade is not actually installed into any of your computers on the network, no drivers are necessary to get it to function (except for those for the built-in print server). A simple flick of the power button is all that's needed to get the Barricade going.

Administration of the Barricade is through a web interface that you can access through any web browser. For security reasons, you can only access this from inside (your LAN) your network and not from outside (the Internet). Of course, like all other things found in the Barricade, that can be changed.

The interface was very easy and straightforward to use. It included all the necessary screens needed to properly configure your Internet/LAN connection and to help you customize your network.

Like all other firewalls, both software and hardware, the Barricade will block almost all of your ports; therefore, rendering certain programs and games more or less functionless. Furthermore, if you are running any servers on any of the computers behind the firewall, chances are, they will cease to function--unless you configure them on the Barricade. As such, the Barricade has special configuration screens to help you get your programs, games and servers running properly again. Using these configuration screens, you can manually specify which ports to open and how to direct traffic to the different computers in your network. This is a very useful feature that is not found if one chooses to use the Internet sharing software built-into Windows 98 SE, Windows ME or even Windows 2000 and should also be an important reason for one to choose a hardware solution over a software solution.

Manually configuring these settings can give almost anyone a headache as each setting varies from each different application, game or server. Traditionally, one would have to search through many web pages (or other sources) in order to find the correct method to configure them on the server, but SMC has included many pre-set configurations that you can quickly configure your Barricade router to use. Below is a listing of all of the pre-configured settings that SMC has included:

Virtual Servers AUTH (113) DNS (53) FTP (21) POP3 (110) PPTP (1723) SMTP (25) TELNET (23) WEB (80)

Special Applications Battle.net Dialpad ICU II MSN Gaming Zone PC-to-Phone Quick Time 4

If you find that your application, game or server is not listed here, you'll still have to resort to the traditional method of finding these settings yourself.

There is, however, a very large downside to how one can configure these settings on the Barricade. On the screens for configuring the applications and servers in the web interface, there are 10 slots for configuring servers and only 4 for special applications; however, you are only limited to these 14 and, therefore, cannot configure more than that allotted number. This could pose a problem for users with large networks running many different applications and servers.

There is also a very useful feature that you can enable called the DMZ Host. You can choose 1 computer from behind the network to be completely connected to the Internet as if there was no firewall in front of it. This can be very useful if you have a server that you would like to run on your network but don't wish to manually add in the different ports to open for each service on that server. I currently use this feature for my "main computer" so I don't have to manually configure the different ports needed for playing all my games.

Once all the necessary configurations on the Barricade were made (initial configuration to get the Internet running took about 10 mins.), all I had to do to get all my computers on the 'net was set them to obtain their IP addresses automatically in the Windows Network control panel. Doing this utilizes the Barricade's built-in DHCP server and will automatically configure all the network settings in every computer on the network for you.

The Internet functioned perfectly on all the computers. I did not notice any slowdowns whatsoever that were caused by the Barricade and I now have the freedom of not always having to leave my main computer on all the time.

On to: Conclusion