Macs have been equipped with Gigabit Ethernet for quite some years now. Even my old G4 has a Gigabit Ethernet port. Home users cripple that port’s blazing speed by hooking up an Airport, but video editors, compositing and 3D artists want to network at the highest possible speed, so they can render their results as fast as possible. For them, Gigabit Ethernet is a business need. 

To connect your different Mac (and Windows) workstations, the best and fastest connection hubs are managed Gigabit switches. And if the network has to be exposed to the insecure Internet, a good firewall gives you peace of mind. NetGear has enterprise-level experience with networking equipment and has a range of smaller switches and firewalls suitable for the workgroups often encountered in smaller creative shops. Their GS108T and FVS124G may have names that make your eyes roll, but these smaller devices are inexpensive and as I found out, powerful enough to drive some serious network traffic within a safe environment.

I’m starting this review with the managed GS108T switch. This is an 8-port managed switch and it’s one of the smallest NetGear has on offer. Managed means you can set all of the network parameters. Given the fact that this switch can be used to manage Virtual LANs and some basic network security, it pays off to either be a network administrator or to thoroughly read the manual. The GS108T can be accessed by using a web browser, but I immediately found out that Safari wasn’t on its list of favourites. Firefox, on the other hand, is supported.

Web-based Switch Setup

It’s rather strange that Safari can’t handle the switch’s web server, as the ProSafe firewall I tested in tandem with the GS108T has been developed earlier but is perfectly Safari-savvy. The GS108T comes with a complete installation and user’s manual. It won’t turn you in a network wizard, but it will do a good job teaching you how to set up most of the parameters. By Googling for the terms you don’t readily understand, even network agnostics can set up this switch relatively easy.

Except for explicitly supporting basic settings such as port speed (ranging from Auto to a fixed speed you can set yourself, on a per-port basis) the NetGear GS108T has advanced capabilities that make it a wonderful piece of equipment for users who want to get the most speed out of their network. For example, you can easily set up the switch to support Jumbo frames. This will set the switch in a mode that it accepts the default size data packets but also bigger ones. In a video-editing and 3D rendering environment, an experienced network admin can thus get some additional performance out of the network.

You can also set Quality of Service (QoS) on a per-port basis. If you do, you can think of scenarios where a port with a printer connected to it, gets a lower QoS setting than a port that is hooked up to a render farm. The switch also has a link aggregation feature, where multiple ports can be bundled together and be presented to a system as one port. The speed of such aggregated ports can be higher than the individual ports’ performance.

In terms of security, the NetGear GS108T is not bad either. You can set it so it will only accept traffic from pre-defined MAC addresses --basically, this means that you can restrict traffic to a number of known computers. Virtual LANs of trusted computers can be set up as well. With Storm Control you can disallow more traffic than a pre-defined rate within a pre-defined time period. All of these controls work on individual ports where it is relevant.

Statistics for Workgroup Admins

I’ve never been much of a network expert, but I was able to set up the GS108T without much trouble. To be quite honest, I haven’t tested the more complicated features of the switch --or at least: those requiring an in-depth knowledge of networks. But with 4 computers and 2 printers I could test the throughput and above all the influence of different settings on network performance. The good news is that the GS108T had no trouble in keeping the bandwidth saturated to the point that I would allow it. The best news is that I didn’t need a Ph.D. in networking to set it all up in less than an afternoon.

A nice feature of the switch that can be of importance to larger workgroups --I doubt if it’s that important for an 8-port network-- is that you can see statistics of traffic and errors.

Did it secure my network? Well, yes and no. I don’t think it would be wise to use the NetGear GS108T as a replacement for a true firewall between your network and the Internet. But it certainly secured the network in terms of keeping it alive and healthy, at the LAN side.

For firewall functionality, I tested the ProSafe VPN Firewall 25, the NetGear FVS124G. I really became thrilled with the ProSafe firewall. If you’ve ever set up Mac OS X Server’s firewall, the ProSafe FVS124G will be very familiar in its set up and maintenance capabilities. I will be discussing the ProSafe FVS124G soon.