This Is a Router...

To be precise, this is a Check Point L-50W router. It has ten Gigabit ports and Wireless N radio. Not cutting edge specs, yet workable for many of today's applications and very dependable. Also, it is out of support by the manufacturer as of August 2022. Why? Because manufacturers like Check Point (and Cisco, and Sophos, and many others) sell both equipment and services. As they upgrade their service offerings (including software), they require their corporate clients to upgrade to newer hardware. The slightly older hardware, meanwhile, gets purged from the customers' networks and often ends up on eBay, where it may be purchased at very reasonable prices.

What about software though? If the devices are retired because they can't run new software, what's the point of getting them? The point is, alternative software exists, is under active development, and can make the supposedly obsolete devices fully workable, less some of the features that are of interest only to large organizations (for example, remote management). A lot of that software is open source and freely available.

At NCbase.NET, we specialize in making commercial-grade hardware work with open-source software.

On this site, you can learn about open-source router software, read about some devices that are known to work with it, and peruse our inventory of commercial-grade devices running open-source software.