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Bluesniper says thank you!

FCC is just a giant First Amendment violation.

Ever heard of radio jamming? It doesn't take much to get a radio transmission to cover the entire globe, so some coordination is very helpful.

The FCC is about coordination to increase the ability of Americans to use the 1st Amendment... by playing nice with other nations who can just as easily jam our communications.

The original purpose of the FCC was for two reasons, and both still apply:

1. To enforce radio treaties between the US and other nations. That way everybody can hear radio clearly.
2. To separate the radio spectrum into chunks so information could be transferred most efficiently.

Honestly, the same principle applies locally for low-power transmissions: A bit of neighborhood coordination can make your WiFi better.

From https://www.smallnetbuilder.co...:

The AC2200 classification (400 MHz @ 2.4 GHz + 2 x 867 Mbps @ 5 GHz) and "tri-band" description mean Velop has a dedicated 5 GHz backhaul radio.

It is trivial to turn off the routing functionality, effectively configuring the router into AP.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com...

If sourcing substantially different parts from different vendors is necessary to meet production volume, then they need to have different part names and model names for these products. This isn't a case of having resistors or capacitors from different manufacturers, something that won't affect performance in any measurable way, this is a case of having two completely different CPUs, with very different performance from the two. 6h vs. 8h in a power-consumption test is a huge, huge difference. Intel sells CPUs all the time which are very similar, but have performance that differs to that extent: they use completely different part numbers to describe these parts.

You have ABSOLUTELY no idea how manufacturing works, period.

And if someone is only getting 6 or 8 hours on a modern iPhone, they are running it full-tilt CONTINUOUSLY for that time; which is exacerbating the (for example) 3.663 W vs. 3.664 W of power consumption between the two chips. In most use-cases, I would bet that most Users, with the exception of highly-addicted Gamers, hardly experience a difference in real world use.

That is NOT to say that Samsung doesn't have some esplainin' to do; but I would bet that this is mostly a difference between the dielectric thickness in Samsung's 14 nm Process, vs. TSMC's 16 nm Process.

Hopefully, Samsung will figure it out.

Oh, and as another Poster pointed out, Apple did give the two "variants" different Model Numbers. You just have to be a bit vigilant if you want a particular one.

For another prime example: How many "variants" does the average consumer WiFi Router have, under the exact same Model Number on the box, case-graphics, owner's manual, etc? Those people seem to routinely spawn different hardware variants every few months with absolutely no visible change, other than maybe a "Rev Number" on the bottom of the unit. And oh, BTW, those "variants" often have VERY different performance characteristics. Don't believe me? Try cruising the Reviews on smallnetbuilder.com. So, give us all a break, willya?

Hi,
I've written a tutorial for installing freebsd on an encrypted root using a serial console. That should actually explain some things.

http://forums.smallnetbuilder....

Otherwise:

Get an installer image:
https://www.freebsd.org/where....

The release version is FreeBSD-10.1

try the memstick image
a "cp FreeBSD.img /dev/sdX" will copy it to stick

While you install:
don't install the package ports, you will get the freshest ones
through portsnap

Add an "admin" user make him member of group "wheel"
because that user can ssh and then "su" to root.

When you have installed FreeBSD

a.) run portsnap fetch extract
- after this your ports tree is up to date

b.) run freebsd-update fetch install
- after this your FreeBSD-system is up to date

c.) kill sendmail-demon
- after this you will feel no change at all

d.) installa samba via ports(verbosive) or via pkg add samba

you install things using the ports collection by enter the directory /usr/ports
where you choose the category for example the midnight commander can be found under "/usr/ports/misc/mc"

you start the installation using make install
afterwards you can do a make clean
or make distclean.

ports is "just" make-scripts

Hint:
svn is included in the FreeBSD base distribution
it can be called via svn-lite

So you can also checkout the current freebsd-head (FreeBSD handbook says how), browse the /usr/src directory or where yyou will then recognize that every command's source has a separate directory with make file etc..

Meaning you can now play with the source of the base distribution(userland) and kernel

FreeBSD is fun, and a base system really has a small footprint.

As does the Merlin fork if you're using that http://forums.smallnetbuilder....

He's already got a temporary patch up which will disable the vulnerable feature. (He also shows a few other ways of securing the issue)

http://forums.smallnetbuilder....

From Merlin himself:
http://forums.smallnetbuilder....
He says disable aicloud and the ftpd for now.

I stopped using RAID in any of my systems after I started using WHSv1. WHS2011 has the same feature -- live system backups. If a drive fails, I pop in a new one (of any type/size), boot a CD that came with WHS (essentially a WinPE environment with a recovery software baked in), select my backup (I save 7-10 days -- I forget what it's set to), and in about an hour my system is back to the state of the last backup.

There's the operative phrase. RAID is for systems where you can't have or don't want an hour of downtime while restoring from a backup. The R in RAID stands for redundant. As in you can have a failure and keep going.

Note that this is the converse of "RAID is not a backup!" Just like RAID is not a replacement for a backup, a backup is not a replacement for RAID either. They do different things (and if you're smart, you will also backup your RAID). From your own description, you wanted a backup. RAID was never the correct solution for your needs.

Excuse me, but lots of people use software mirroring in home systems purely for data protection.
These are systems that absolutely CAN take an hour of downtime.

With easy to use bare-metal recovery you can do point in time backups to an internal second drive and restore from the recovery boot environment. PLUS you get file level recovery while the system is online.

This gives you MORE data protection than RAID 1 affords.

You can certainly do both RAID and backups, but with easy bare metal recovery and a typical dual drive workstation you have a choice to make.

I stopped using RAID in any of my systems after I started using WHSv1. WHS2011 has the same feature -- live system backups. If a drive fails, I pop in a new one (of any type/size), boot a CD that came with WHS (essentially a WinPE environment with a recovery software baked in), select my backup (I save 7-10 days -- I forget what it's set to), and in about an hour my system is back to the state of the last backup.

There's the operative phrase. RAID is for systems where you can't have or don't want an hour of downtime while restoring from a backup. The R in RAID stands for redundant. As in you can have a failure and keep going.

Note that this is the converse of "RAID is not a backup!" Just like RAID is not a replacement for a backup, a backup is not a replacement for RAID either. They do different things (and if you're smart, you will also backup your RAID). From your own description, you wanted a backup. RAID was never the correct solution for your needs.

Inspired, I went and actually looked.

Apparently, the Asus RT-N16 is good for about 141Mbps of actual routing from the WAN interface to an internal LAN.

There are others in the ~$100 range listed which can do many times this much.

The fastest in that list is a visually-hideous and rather expensive D-Link box, which manages a charming 924Mbps.

And thanks for reminding me about the difference between routing and switching, you patronizing shit. GTFO my lawn.

Inspired, I went and actually looked.

Apparently, the Asus RT-N16 is good for about 141Mbps of actual routing from the WAN interface to an internal LAN.

There are others in the ~$100 range listed which can do many times this much.

The fastest in that list is a visually-hideous and rather expensive D-Link box, which manages a charming 924Mbps.

And thanks for reminding me about the difference between routing and switching, you patronizing shit. GTFO my lawn.

Last thing I'd check is your jumbo frames setting.

Already said that it is on.

And it probably only buys you 5-10% more speed, anyway, assuming you are getting decent overall speeds.

If you are down less 20MB/sec (like these benchmarks), you can get a 20-50% boost. Without jumbo frames, I run a solid 40MB/sec copying from one Windows share to another on my network, and jumbo frames couldn't get me over 50MB/sec, while mis-matches between jumbo/non-jumbo config dropped me to less than 20MB/sec at times.

Note that if I eliminate the slowest hard drive in the transfer by reading from a very fast 8-drive RAID array across the network to RAM in another machine, the speeds jump to nearly 80MB/sec. Protocal makes a huge difference, as using ftp (which has less overhead than SMB) I get 95MB/sec (from a 4-disk array to the fast 8-drive array). Yes, that's still below the 125MB/sec theoretical max, but I'm still reading from spinning drives and this not a test environment where the machines are doing nothing but a benchmark test.

Some sort of NAS or tape would be your best option without knowing more. How often do you need to do the "backup"? Is it really a "backup" or data replication eg. are you needing to restore the data after a serious failure. Have a look at this seems to have some good advise and i think could be a solution to your issue, as i see the big problem is the amount of time and the restorability of the data after a failure. http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-howto/31485-build-your-own-fibre-channel-san-for-less-than-1000-part-1

SmallNetBuilder has some good articles: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/security/security-howto For example, consider installing pfsense firewall in front of your DMZ. Also, if you run your OS on Ubuntu I recommend installing apticron, which will alert you to new patches. Stay fully patched.

I haven't owned a Drobo so I can't comment on the quality or functionality. But QNAP and Synology are generally considered the leaders in the NAS market. SmallNetBuilder has pretty thorough coverage and benchmarks of your NAS options.

If you don't need a NAS, just some form of aggregate storage, non-networked alternatives are made by Mediasonic and Sans Digital. In my case I just needed something to throw my old drives in and power it on every couple weeks to backup my ZFS file server. So one of these connected via USB 3.0 or eSATA worked just fine.

...after you wipe them, and buy a real NAS like a ReadyNas, Synology, etc. smallnetbuilder is a great resource for this.
Alternatively, use FreeNAS and build your own, with recent drives.

RAID sucks as a backup because if you accidentally delete a file off your RAID storage, it gets deleted from all the drives in the RAID. Your file is not safe as it would be on a backup.

RAID is for redundancy. So you don't have any downtime if a HDD fails. Without RAID, a HDD failure would mean downtime until you can get a new drive and restore from a backup. With RAID, your array and your business keeps chugging along as if there were no failure, and you can replace your failed HDD at your leisure.

Rebuilding a RAID array with a failed drive has been simple and automatic in my experience. Pop out the dead drive, plug in the new one, and it'll start rebuilding automatically. Your data is still accessible during the rebuild, although access times and transfer speeds may be degraded. Depending on the amount of data, a rebuild can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. A second failure while rebuilding means all your data is gone. So you want to keep backups of everything on your RAID array.

If you just want to glom a bunch of old drives together to use as a backup drive, you want a multi-bay JBOD/RAID enclosure like this or this. Be forewarned that if you plug these in over eSATA, you need an eSATA port with port multiplication. No laptop eSATA port I've found does, so you'll need to rely on USB or built-in hardware RAID/JBOD to use these with a laptop.

If you want something which will sit on your network acting as a file server, you want a NAS like this or this or this. You can read NAS comparisons at Small Net Builder. But keep in mind what I said above - even if you get a NAS, you will still need to make backups of it.

Build one with DD-WRT. Here's a set of instructions:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-howto/30150-how-to-build-an-open-source-wi-fi-hotspot-with-dd-wrt

1: go read smallnetbuilder and decide for yourself.

2: Mikrotik probably has something you'd be happy with for not a lot of money.

Mikrotik is cheap and easy to configuire. I do not believe you can get better!
If you are really "up for it" try an RB1000
Glenn.

1: go read smallnetbuilder and decide for yourself.

2: Mikrotik probably has something you'd be happy with for not a lot of money.

If you're serious about finding the best router for your needs you'll need to look at the features/benchmarks and pros vs cons of various routers out there.

The best site i've found for this is Small Net Builder" .

I've successfully relied on SmallNetBuilder to purchase equipment for clients on a tight budget before. Some of the consumer stuff can be a diamond in the rough. This page in particular is probably a good starting point for your hardware needs. It sounds like you've got the software part figured out.

--
Andy

There is some benchmarks at SmallNetBuilder you might be interested in, I've been eyeing on those for my next router.

You can find an excellent source for reviews of SOHO networking gear at http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/

I am in no way affiliated with the site.

Follow up to that. I'm using RV082 v3 which actually do support IPv6. SmallNetBuilder has a good review of them here http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-reviews/31525-cisco-rv082-and-rv016-v3-vpn-routers-reviewed

Run your users through a "Captive Gateway" to authenticate them an agree to your Acceptable Terms of Use. Here is a guide I found for some open source solutions using a quick google search:

One google search away, you'll see that there are indeed routers that can do this, and many that can't.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/view

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/31063-usb-30-drive-smackdown?start=1

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wireless/wireless-howto/31190-when-wireless-lans-collide-how-to-beat-the-wireless-crowd - The guy is no slouch. maybe not the most technical article I ever read, but it should help you.

Actually, the DNS-321 is slightly cheaper. It doesn't have a bittorrent client built in so if you need that then you should get the 323 for the client and then expand with 321s. I found a comparison between the 2 online.. http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30520/79/ There's no DCHP on the 321 either but chances are you have a wireless router or a real router handling that stuff. No support for printers either but again.. you need that just get 1 323 and then fill out your closet with 321s. Turns out the 321 is faster if you go over 64 MB.. which you'll probably be doing a lot if you're doing movies. I have 2 321s with 2TB drives for a total of 8TB of movies. The solution is damned cheap in my opinion.. costing only about $50 on top of the drives (the 321 is less then $100 if you hit the rebates (tigerdirect.com) for 2 drives). The only problem I've had is a screwy permission problem that creeps up every once in a while... I can't copy onto or off of the drive because of permission problems for some files. I think it has something to do with how the DNS-321 handles the file metadata from OSX. Seems to work fine with PCs though I haven't pushed it like I have with OSX.

Here's a good chart showing actual throughput for a bunch of different routers

The netgear WNDR 3700 is running a version of OpenWRT out of the box with a custom interface. OpenWRT has a few builds of their standard distribution which work, with full support being rapidly added. DD-WRT is working hard on adding support for the router as well with at least two test builds being released. Full support should be there within a few months. Again, with it running a customized OpenWRT out of the box, it is only a matter of time for all the router based distributions to have ports which run on it.

Totally agree with Fallen Kell, having tried most on the market, the Netgear WNDR 3700 is the best router money can by right now. http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/

You would think so right? But there's a WIDE disparity in what some routers can and can't do! http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_chart&Itemid=167 When you throw in NAT and any additional filtering you begin to ask a great deal of the processor and many of these little boxes just do not have the CPU power or memory. What happens when you begin to flood it with UDP connection requests ala bittorent? What happens if you add blacklists? Do you want content filtering? QOS? VPN? All of the above?

I'm running Tomato, and reviews seems to indicate that it should be slightly faster than DD-WRT in some cases, but the difference would not be major in any sense. There's a year and a half old review of the two firmwares with some figures here.

None of them get close to 100 Mpbs unfortunately. Overclocking would help, but I doubt it would be enough. There's some info on overclocking DD-WRT here.

As for the RouterStation Pro there's some info on the recently completed competition to develop a Open-WRT based admin interface for it, posted in slashdot a few weeks ago, some furher details here.

I really like the WRT-routers, they're stable and cheap, but a bit too slow.

In some countries, like here in Sweden, this was a problem 8-9 years or so ago (when we started getting 100/100mbit at home) and was under much discussion then, but I fail to see how it is a problem now. There are plenty of consumer home routers now that can handle this. I can highly recommend the more expensive DLINK routers, yes I know, the cheaper ones are ... not very good. Have a look at the DIR-655 or all of the DIR8xx series, excellent in my and many others experience. Stable, fast, never needed a reboot and has no performance problems for high-speed downloads, be it direct downloads from a single source or hundreds/thousands of connections in torrents. Have no problems maxing out my 100/100 connection. Even has traffic shaping so your downloads or uploads don't interfere (noticeably) with your gaming or browsing etc.

Pfsenese or m0n0wall might be more fun though, but if you don't run it on some small embedded device (but still have to find one powerful enough) it will draw more power than a small modern above average home router.

See this chart of actual WAN-LAN throughput for home routers: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/

Mind you you will have to use wired not wifi for those speeds.

That one actually rates decently here -> http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/index.php?option=com_chart&Itemid=167 but it looks like there's a bunch of others beating it pretty badly too. An OpenWRT port or something like it would be a major attraction though!

There are a number of other choices as well.
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/ Speed comparison here. -M

look here: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_wireless/Itemid,200

The replies you've got so far seem to think that just because a router has gigabit ports that it can do NAT at gigabit speeds, which of course you've already figured out is nonsense.

True, but there's a number of routers that do have pretty impressive performance - I think the ones pushing 200+Mbps are lying during the test, but a number of not-so-cheap home routers do perfectly fine. (These aren't the $20 specials, but they're half decent, and most are under $200 on sale).

You won't be doing NAT at GigE speeds - you can try, but there'll be bottlenecks in any system before you hit GigE. But a decent home router can be acquired that will handle the load easily.

The only real issue is the router's (or Linux?) limit of 4096 connections, which may be easily saturated if you do a lot of torrenting. (Especially UDP connections - nothing keels over a router faster than having UDP sessions clog up the NAT tables). But these routers often have decent processors and decent amounts of RAM, and many on the top run Linux.

My ISP links to http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/ which has throughput numbers for common home routers.

The long and short of it is that a lot of these devices have pretty poor performance, and can get away with it because they're used on 1.5mbps lines. However, there are some out there that are decent.

Of course, there's the build-it-yourself approach with m0n0wall or pfSense or something else. With a spare PC laying around you'll likely get reasonable performance, although electricity usage is quite a bit higher than an appliance.

NAS Reviews can be found at http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/blogcategory/50/75/

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30549/75/1/2/

The QNAP TS-509 does pretty well.

Just visit small network builder and look up their NAS charts. Contains benchmark for every device they ever tested.

Building your own is still strongly recommended. If you want a quality system, buy a dirt cheap HP Proliant ML115 server and four fast >1TB SATA II drives. Use software raid 10 mode (mdadm can handle this) and it'll fly. It's also reusable, I just converted mine to run whitebox VMWare ESXi without any hassles.

I switched from a Linksys WRT54G v2.0 running OEM then Sveasoft firmware to a DIR-655 after analyzing the data provided on SmallNetBuilder's Router Performance Charts. My maximum WAN performance increased from approximately 384kB/s down & 48kB/s up, to 1MB/s down & 128kB/s up. Further, the DIR-655's feature set exceeds that of the WRT54G's running either firmware, especially for security configuration.

Although D-Link has fucked up, and my admiration for Linksys' FOSS firmware, I'm compelled to excuse D-Link given their SOHO router performance and feature set. (This is my only experience with D-Link; I'll continue to stick with Intel for NICs and Linksys for switches, either of which have yet to disappoint.)

Check http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_nas/Itemid,190

I decided to get a Thecus (N5200B) over a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ (also a diskless). The Thecus is the fastest while the ReadyNAS appears to have the easiest method of expansion. It's been about a month, so things most likely have changed a bit. Up until recently, http://smallnetbuilder.com/ has been the most informative source I've found.

You'll note that the 2 boxes are about $650 and $850, respectively, so you're easily in the range of a cheap computer. The reason I'm leaning towards these is power usage, size, and ease of use.

If you want cheaper, you can do it. If you don't mind power/heat and a larger size, its very easy to accomplish.

Parent is not making a joke

See this

If you want relatively cheap hardware, you could just go buy a 2nd hand Xbox... and follow the directions here. Note that Part 1 is mainly about hacking the Xbox to run linux, and that Parts 2 & 3 get into the software setup... They're linked on the last page of the previous part (or you can click the 'NAS HOWTO' menu and you'll find all the parts towards the end of the page...