Cisco ASA5505-SEC-BUN-K9 ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Router Appliance

• WITH SW UL USERS HA 3DES/AES

I use this firewall at my home. Probably overkill, but it had what I wanted. Nice that it runs the same operating system as the larger enterprise size firewalls. The configuration is easy using the intuitive wizards and the GUI. Command line options are easy if you are familiar with Cisco CLI. Built in switch with PoE makes for nice addition. A little on the pricey side for your average home user, but great price point for business users in SOHO environment.

Buy Cisco ASA5505-SEC-BUN-K9 ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Router Appliance Now

I've bought three of these things so far, two as firewalls for our Internet connections at work and one at home to replace a succession of apparently disposable Linksys routers.

This is the $1000 version that we use for the work firewalls, but the $400 entry level version is what I have at home and I love having the same enterprise-class security and monitoring features at home that we have at work.

The 5505 in its various license levels is the entry to the Cisco ASA family of security appliances. It runs the same software as the high end models that cost thousands of tens of thousands of dollars. It's a very versatile system that gives you a lot of flexibility as a firewall, and a point-to-point IPSec tunnel, as well as a remote access VPN server.

You can get a Cisco service contract that covers hardware replacement and offers software updates on an annual subscription basis for a reasonable cost. Unfortunately this is something you can't buy through Amazon but will have to find a Cisco reseller to purchase it from. I highly recommend getting the support contract for each device just so you can get the software updates which are fairly frequent.

It's a lot more money for an ASA 5505 than for a cheap router, and you need to be prepared to deal with the much more complicated configuration options (but it's nothing the average computer enthusiast will have much problem with), but I've been MUCH happier with these things so far.