NetGear - supposedly a well-known brand in Netwroking Devices, specially broadband modems and routers. Well, I'm going to reveal to you all, how horribly bad their after-sales service is.

So, I have this NetGear DG632 ADSL modem-router connecting me to the world. The product works all fine - except that it has a lousy web-based configuration interface which refuses to come up at times. Just keeps loading and never comes up... anyways, that's not the problem.. The router uses the standard NAT and Port Forwarding to forward various service requests (http, ftp, mail etc.) to various systems on your LAN. Port forwarding for FTP, Mail etc work just fine - but it simply wouldn't work for http requests - for completely unknown reasons.. I've made so many people on this board log onto my ftp/mail server for testing - but none of them could ever reach my http server. It just wouldn't forward the request at all.. So with this problem I contacted their Support.

Now their so-called "After-Sales Support" has 2 plans.. one if for free which they "provide" to any netgear product owner and another accelerated blah blah service for people who purchase their service plan. The http issue seemed to be to be a minor problem - plus I had no intentions of buying an expensive support plan for such a little problem - so quite obviously I opted for their free service - which made me register myself using the Serial Number on my router in order to validate myself as an authentic netgear product owner... I did that along with the usual username password blah blah... Next I filed a complaint/support request with exactly the problem I've stated above - that their router wouldn't forward any http requests.

In comes an autoresponder mail saying we've received your complaint.. etc.. this is your ticket number..blah... all crap....and that you'll be contacted "soon" by our service representative.. Fine. Their "soon" first turned out to be a week, then two weeks ..and now it's well over a month. I've written to them several times - no response. Nothing. Zilch. Instead - how outrageous can it get - bloody NetGear sends me a mail after a months time, asking me "How was our service against the support request you filed recently? Was it satisfactory.. bad.. etc. Would you care to participate in this online survery to let us know?"

Cool, this seemed to me a golden opportunity to plant a hard kick on their back and make them sit straight up & take notice.. So I went ahead and gave them the lowest ratings possible on their survey - and wrote off a very bad review. Even pointed it out to them that when they have NO INTENTION of providing free service to their cutomers, WHY THE HELL do they have that option of free service on their page? They should very well take it off and replace it with Paid-Only service.. at least the customers are not left off wondering about when they are going to be contacted and their problems fixed!!! I ask you What is the NEED of doing all this DRAMA?

Anyways - the kind of review I gave them - is enough to make a cherry loose its color. Any customer service department with the faintest vestiges of shame would have immediately contacted me... but THEM?? NOOOO.. they're completely shameless, pathetic .. running out of good adjectives for them... Atrocious I tell you - worse than MAGGOTS.

DO NOT EVER BUY A PRODUCT FROM NETGEAR.... COZ IF YOU DO, AND THEN RUN INTO A PROBLEM, YOU'D END UP PAYING 3 TIMES THE PRICE OF YOUR PRODUCT FOR AFTER-SALES SERVICE. I RECOMMEND AGAINST IT VERY VERY STRONGLY. Its your choice...

Regards,
m^e


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I even went to their forums and posted this same message there with a P.S. which goes like:


Now if they seriously delete my post - they've had it.
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Gee m^e, wish that you had asked me first. I could have told you that NetGear was not the company that everyone thinks it is.

NetGear is very popular as far as the average joe goes because their equipement is easy to use but lack allaround features such as decent port forwarding. I also dislike web-based interface with the router I own (LinkSys) and wish that it had a shell type interface option.

Are you using DHCP for your LAN. if so, that may be your issue. Some routers won't allow port forwarding when DHCP is used because there is no way to ensure that the correct IP address will be used. From time to time I have issues when my computer and my wifes computers are restarted at the same time. I usually forward to XX.XX.XX.101 but if my wife's system boots first, then her IP is assigned to XX.XX.XX.101 and mine is XX.XX.XX.102

If that is the problem, then you'll need to assign IP address to your various networked hardware and then turn DHCP off.

If you know how to assign IP address to be ststic and get it to work with the router/switch please let me know. I would prefer to do it that way but have no clue how.

Happy Networking.

vujsa

Hehe.. I never trusted this one's DHCP anyways - so first thing I did when I switched on the router the first time, was to turn off it's DHCP. I'd rather trust my Linux servers to handle all kinds of server-ly work So DHCP, named, httpd, ftpd, postfix etc... all run from my Linux servers - the workload split among two servers - one running httpd, named & dhcp and the other for FTP and mail.

Infact the linux servers themselves have static IP (for obvious reasons) - and one of them dishes out IPs through dhcp to the windows workstations - which don't run any net servers... Moreover, I've fixed the IP's to be assigned to my windows machines based on their MAC addresses. So every machine gets it's own IP - the same one all the time. The router really doens't have to bother with figuring out where the packet's heading. It just blindly forwards them to the specified IP's in it's config db.

Here's the funny thing - first of all it messes up in most port forwards.. but still somehow works fine with FTP/Postfix/Pop3 .. but where it fails miserably is http... It simply wouldn't forward http requests. On a few rare occasions it's even happened so that instead of forwarding the request, it has popped up it's admin console login box to the outside word.. IMAGINE A ROUTER DOING THAT ...lol.. I guess, since it listens on the port 80 itself for admin purposes, it fails miserably to forward the request.

Anyways - as soon as I get back from home (in a months time) - I'm buying a Cisco and trashing this one.. tI'll turn this into a Modem-only thingie (it's got a modem mode) ... and let it simply connect.. and I'll put up my hate mail everywhere...lol

Regards,
m^e