Wanadoo Livebox and 3rd party appliances

A friend is about to sign up to Wanadoo, on the £17.99 p/m option which
seems to include a Livebox. Having seen another friends Livebox a year
or two ago, I think they look awful, and I'd have recommended a
different ISP but that's besides the point. Anyway, will any 3rd party
PCMCIA card happily work with this box (most likely Netgear WG511 or
D-Link G650)?

Also, and sorry for not googling this, is the Livebox actually any good?
For example, is the hardware firewall useful and easily configurable,
or is it something that should be disabled and just set up software
firewalls instead?

--
[ste]
Under Defeat: Who said the Dreamcast is dead?!

In message <(E-Mail Removed)>, "[ste parker]"
<(E-Mail Removed)> writes

>A friend is about to sign up to Wanadoo, on the £17.99 p/m option which
>seems to include a Livebox. Having seen another friends Livebox a year
>or two ago, I think they look awful, and I'd have recommended a
>different ISP but that's besides the point. Anyway, will any 3rd party
>PCMCIA card happily work with this box (most likely Netgear WG511 or D-
>Link G650)?

I setup a 3Com wifi PCMCIA card to talk to the Livebox and it works OK -
- even with encryption

>Also, and sorry for not googling this, is the Livebox actually any
>good?

Though not my preference it seems to do NAT & Firewall OK

>For example, is the hardware firewall useful and easily configurable,
>or is it something that should be disabled and just set up software
>firewalls instead?

I'd never substitute an inbound software FW for a hardware FW -- by all
means run them both so the software FW will tell you about outbound
connections you didn't know about.

You'll never stop dumb people from hurting themselves but at least with
the Livebox NAT & FW you'll stop the port scanners from getting into the
box.
--
Tony

On Sat, 06 May 2006 00:17:17 +0100, "[ste parker]"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>A friend is about to sign up to Wanadoo, on the £17.99 p/m option which
>seems to include a Livebox. Having seen another friends Livebox a year
>or two ago, I think they look awful, and I'd have recommended a
>different ISP but that's besides the point. Anyway, will any 3rd party
>PCMCIA card happily work with this box (most likely Netgear WG511 or
>D-Link G650)?

Yes, it will do.
>
>Also, and sorry for not googling this, is the Livebox actually any good?
> For example, is the hardware firewall useful and easily configurable,
>or is it something that should be disabled and just set up software
>firewalls instead?

They have NAT and a basic hardware firewall which will keep the
scanners from doing any damage, obviously outgoing connections are
another matter. I tend to just let the hardware firewall do its
thing, and run antivirus and spyware with Windows XP SP2 software
firewall, but thats my own preference.

One gotya' with the livebox is that they do remote firmware upgrades
sometimes, when I got called out to one it was unplugged (probably) at
the point of doing this, and the firmware was damaged. They rang up
Wanadoo and they said they could send out a recovery CD, but it never
came, and I got one off the Internet which uploaded a lower firmware
via TFTP, which subsequently got updated to the latest when it got
connected to Wanadoo's service. You could tell this as after
connection the lights on the front went crazy, and it looked like it
rebooted a couple of times.

You can do quite a lot in the web management though, if you look deep
enough.

Andrew.
--
Andrew Hodgson in Bromyard, Herefordshire, UK.
My Email: use <andrew at hodgsonfamily dot org>.