Customer Reviews
Unrealized Potential 
2008-03-06
Have had this device for over a year. Great specs and features for an advanced SOHO. Not very stable and constently needs to be reset manually. Have had the same problems with its sister product (WRVS4400N) which I also own. They are both niche products and Linksys is really not putting out stable firmware for either. I no lomger have them in my home network.
Y4K junk heap! firmware download of 1.1.14 registered as 1.1.11! how stupid is that?! 2008-02-16
In addition to said title of this message, you can't even access the configuration with the "admin" user/passcode. If you use utilities to update firmware, the onsite firmware is acutally listed as 1.1.14 and DOWNDates mine from it's inital 1.1.12 to 1.1.11! how droll! If you have an earthlink acount, your in for a bigger mess as they're "spaeecial!" meaning you must both bridge your modem(via instructions if your lucky to get a tech that's cohearent, I did. once.) The router has it's own problems(thus I don't reveiw my modem) the modem problem is solved! And yet mister router here, still won't config once you bridge it. PPOE support is awful! avoid in not only Vista but also XP!!! Not OS fault, the router's lameness and mal firmware!
Product fine, but VPN for Vista doesn't work yet 
2008-02-13
There isn't a problem with this router, it works fine, however, if you are using Windows Vista you are in trouble. This is because Linksys still hasn't resolved why its QuickVPN software won't connect with Vista. So, if you are buying the VPN router hoping to connect to your office, watch out. QuickVPN doesn't work and despite Linksys (Cisco)'s giant size--their engineers cannot solve the QuickVPN problem.
They should disclose this to you before you buy the router. This is why I am writing the review--to warn the next buyer.
VPN doesn't work 
2008-02-13
The basic router functions seem to work. Others say the latency is poor - but I have no means to measure it. However, trying to make a VPN connection through it using QuickVPN does not work for me. I have been trying to get help on the Linksys forum - plenty of others with similar problems but no solutions. I tried getting online support a couple of times - but gave up waiting. Documentation useless. Error messages meaningless and diagnostic tools, none. I suggest trying something else.
Problematic with terrible latency 2007-12-27
The feature set of this router looks compelling. It supports VPN and 1GbE connections. However, the design is terribly flawed.
Firstly, any significant changes to the router settings require a complete router reboot. The reboot takes forever and so if you are doing anything complicated, be prepared to spend a while waiting for the router to reboot after every change you make.
Second, the router has horrible latency. If you ping this router, your latency should be <1ms. However, this router under that best circumstances requires up to 10ms to forward your packets. My router is currently about to die and will give bursts of latency as high as 900ms! This makes doing anything horribly painful.
When I called Linksys technical support, they did not even know what latency was. Instead they forced me to go through a download and reinstall of the firmware before agreeing to RMA.
Stay away from this POS.
"R" in RVS4000 stands for RESET 2008-07-07
Router is always freezing. VPN is very hard to make work. Made my awful Netgear look stable. If you buy this, send it back quickly. Every change in the setup takes forever to save. Router has to reboot each time. Help is no help. You would think a Cisco company would make better equipment.
Do not buy a RVS4000 as it has problems 2008-06-08
This router does not do FTP through the router even though the manual says it should. The performance for HTTP is very slow. Everything else is functional, though.
Not Reliable 2008-05-25
I replaced a linksys BEFSR81V3 FW 2.45.5 with this RVS4000. Updated factory default to the latest FW and IPS and then configured to match replaced router.
The first thing that happened is that it locked up while doing a scan of the LAN from VPNing in. Had to have the client do a power cycle to get it back.
I had set up email logs to monitor behavior and started to receive many errors. Contacted linksys tech support, actually connected to Cisco product manager, to findout what the errors are and if it would cause a lockup at the client's site. Said it would be corrected in the next FW release, but didn't answer if it would cause a lock up or not. My impression is that their attitude was that they really didn't care (no offer of beta FW release or things to mitigate the lockups) and attempted to pin the "blame" on the load at the client's site. The old BEFSR is a faster router and more reliable than an RVS4000?!
It locked up again during normal use, usage is very light, and had to power cycle to get it back. Remember that this replaced the old BEFSR model that worked reliably for many years. Because IPS adds a lot more load on the router, I disabled that to see if that would prevent the lock up.
It locked up again during normal use. The client power cycled and it started to work again. Investigating this behavior more, I found that it was recommended that I restore factory defaults, install the FW upgrade, restore factory defaults again and then apply the configuration, which I did. It locked up again.
Replaced the RVS4000 with an RV042 and it has been working for weeks without issue. Returned the RVS4000 and Amazon made it easy to do so. I will not use the RVS4000 again.
This costs me a lot of money as the client is a 2 hour round trip away and new, so not a very good first impression.
Hope this help you with your purchase decision.
Please, buy something *ELSE* 2008-05-08
I work from home, I require solid networking. My family is online quite often. I bought the Linksys RVS4000 as an upgrade to my Linksys BEFSR41, which is going on 10 years old I believe. It's been a solid performer all it's life, but was starting to show it's age.
The Linksys RVS4000 is junk, because it falls down doing the one thing it must do well : staying connected and passing traffic. Linksys could remove 50% of the "extras" this rounter does (L2 managed switching, GigE WAN, single port forwarding, QoS traffic shaping, IPS, DOS detection, external syslog, etc) and it wouldn't matter because this router will not stay "online" overnight. Or even for about 9 hours at a time.
The Linksys RVS4000 has been a terrible addition to my network, it needs to be reset every morning (sometimes during the day), it randomly "pauses" during the day sometimes, it is very slow to reboot. It is very slow to reconnect to DHCP "bound" machines.
My slightly beat down BEFSR41 is MILES above this RVS4000 thing because it's at least consistent (slower, but at least it stays online until I transfer about 250mb over an IPsec connection).
Anyway, I am buying a D-Link DGL-4100 (get the 4300 for wireless) as a replacement. Some things spec wise which might be different is the VPN end point management (which many people report as faulty with the Linksys RVS4000) and the 10/100 WAN port on the D-Link instead of GigE on the Linksys.
Yes, I am on the latest firmware. Some people report this works for them, my guess is: give it time, It will probably fail soon enough.
Summary: Do Not Buy This Linksys RVS4000 if you value staying connected, yes I was running the latest xxxx.14 firmware released early in 2008.
VPN Doesn't Work 2008-03-26
I bought this router to set up VPN for a business client. I thought a Linksys router off the shelf would be a simple working solution. The customer needed to attach remotely with an XP laptop using a DSL connection. I set up the router behind a completely open Netopia router from the ISP. The ISP's Netopia router was set up as bridge only. I installed the Linksys QuickVPN client. The QuickVPN client wouldn't work. After 2 weeks on the phone with Linksys it was still not working consistently. It did work 1 time but quickly failed to work. They finally escalated it to another level where they were able to replicate the problem in the "lab". The only criteria were the Linksys router must be set up behind an open DSL router. Likely, this is the most common configuration of all. It must not have been tested in this configuration prior to release. ??? So, they escalated it to another level and sent it to engineering. They can't give me an ETA and don't know when they can even start troubleshooting. They have been very nice if not very helpful. No one has done any real troubleshooting during this whole process. I have done some port analysis and have tried other VPN Clients to no avail.
Conclusion: Portable VPN (QuickVPN) does not work with the RVS4000 behind a DSL router. This is a router without VPN.
Solution: I will try a HotBrick VPN router.
Hotbrick - 401VPN - 4-Port VPN Firewall Router
