New Router

[I7Iz490N]

lol

[palmboy5]

U WOT M8? (Totally not Canadian)

[I7Iz490N]

lol

[2005]

This sale might be easier than resoldering caps and stuff

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6833124190

Meh, soldering is pretty easy and besides it's fun!


I do suppose for the $37 you could just get a new one.

[I7Iz490N]

lol

[2005]

The only thing about the soldering route is that I don't have any of the tools I would need because I've never done that sort of thing before.

Well that would add a few bucks for sure! Any decent setup would probably run you about $50 USD until you got a decent temp controlled solder station, some good solder, a solder sucker, flux and a tip cleaner.

On a side note, I've been using the comcast router they installed at my new house (it's not new, it was my uncles old house... I just live in it now). It's wifi capable, and has 4 lan ports built in. I've been running it for over a month now, and it does the job for me. Strong wireless everywhere in the house, and more then enough speed for me to care about.

I did buy a "linksys/cisco" router just before we moved, and I'm currently not using it. It's a Linksys E1200. Thinking of flashing it with DD-WRT and trying it out to compare. DD-WRT will give me a lot more "options" to play with and a lot of extra functionality that the comcast unit won't but so far I haven't needed anything fancy.

[I7Iz490N]

lol

[palmboy5]

If buying a new WRT54GL is a consideration then I'd add newer routers to the list as well.

Oh yeah, I doubt you're up for this but there's a nice router OS you can run on PC hardware that provides more powerful features and performance thanks to running on inherently faster hardware.
http://www.pfsense.org/

[2005]

pfSense seems like an awesome idea!

And with the hardware he (or any of us really) has, it could easily be virtualized. That way any time
he migrated to newer hardware, he wouldn't have to worry about resetting everything up.


I'm half tempted! Might start looking into some good PCI-E NICs.

[I7Iz490N]

lol

[palmboy5]

pfSense seems like an awesome idea!

And with the hardware he (or any of us really) has, it could easily be virtualized. That way any time
he migrated to newer hardware, he wouldn't have to worry about resetting everything up.


I'm half tempted! Might start looking into some good PCI-E NICs.

I doubt it matters what quality NICs you use, particularly because at least my envisioned plan is that the pfSense box only has two NICs. One for WAN and one for LAN that goes straight to a switch. WiFi would then be a separate access point connected to the switch. Basically, when pfSense only handles traffic between LAN and WAN, there's no need for high end NICs due to low expected speeds anyway (thanks to the wonderful USA internet infrastructure...).

I don't think you can sensibly virtualize it either unless your hardware (CPU and motherboard) supports VT-d (IOMMU). The reason is that you want pfSense to have control over the NICs but it won't have all that much control over those NICs in a typical VM. IOMMU allows for you to assign physical hardware to specific VMs, meaning that the host no longer has control over those hardware (and the VM has direct control).

TL;DR, I never considered to run pfSense in a VM. Bought this a while ago instead. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131843
Atom-level performance and power draw is the perfect choice. Hell, if pfSense ran on ARM then I'd just use a Raspberry Pi with an additional ethernet NIC added through USB.

EDIT: I should clarify that I haven't actually switched to pfSense and the AMD C60 has been sitting around collecting dust. The thing holding me back is that I like DD-WRT's traffic usage log for its simplicity and ability to be backed up. pfSense does have more powerful usage logging in a sense, but it's also more complicated and I haven't found a clear way that I could backup the usage data.

EDIT 2: The main motivation I have for switching to pfSense is that I want to run OpenVPN stuff on the router rather than on individual computers, but OpenVPN encryption is too much for router hardware and limits performance to like 6 Mbps max. Obviously, the solution is to throw better hardware at the problem. PC hardware.

[palmboy5]

battery backup.

Which battery? (just curious)

Uhh, some cheap shit Belkin one I got on sale during black friday like 6 years ago.
This is an older version http://www.amazon.com/Belkin-F6H375-USB ... roduct_top

I bet the battery is basically dead but its plenty for keeping low power stuff like routers running.

My desktop is connected to a separate one I bought more recently:
http://www.amazon.com/APC-Retail-Batter ... apc+1300va

At some point I should get my server running off a UPS as well.. eventually.

[2005]

Low excepted speeds?

Are you saying this relatively, or are you saying that the speeds available in the US aren't good enough for
your usages?

I know here at work we were getting over 50 Mbps, and at home I get between 80 and 90 Mbps down with over 10 Mbps up.

Sure some things still "take a while", but its easily tolerable.

The reason I suggest good NIC's is mainly due to using old hardware. On older hardware, if you use cheaper NIC's then the CPU
will wind up having to work harder. That is what I've read anyways.

As far as virtualization goes, I didn't know that. But it does make sense.

[palmboy5]

I'm saying relatively. Unless you live in a Google-blessed city/neighborhood, no NIC made in the past 10 years can bottleneck the internet you can get.

Yes the CPU does work harder with a cheap NIC but, as with cheap audio chips, I don't think the drag on the CPU has been a concern for quite a while.

I will say to get some Intel NICs though. Not for performance or anything like that but these Unix-based OSes have shit driver support and might not support whatever cheap shit chipset you'd find on cheap NICs/mobos, but the Intel NICs are very well supported. Saves lots of headaches.

[I7Iz490N]

lol