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Choosing a Router/Firewall for the Home LAN
Dr. Zowie asks: "How should one choose a router for a home LAN? We just added a few hosts on our home ethernet, which is connected via DSL. There are an amazing
number of new entries into the market for routers and even stand-alone
firewalls. NetGear,
Linksys,
SMC, and even Panasonic
all have boxen in the $99-$300 range, each of which will do some
combination of NAT, routing, source-IP filtering, port filtering, and
content filtering."
"It's not at all obvious from the packaging, the web sites, or the drool-proof pamphlets in the boxes which routers will do what. For example, we'd like to pass through packets for our two server machines, and use NAT/DHCP on a third address for the rest of the LAN. Nearly all the boxes advertise that they can do NAT routing, but many don't support NAT and static-IP routing simultaneously.
Die-hards will insist that one should run a standalone box with dual ethernet cards and the appropriate routing goodies -- but these standalone boxes, at 5-15 watts and a couple hundred bucks, seem like comparatively hassle-free solution. Which one do you use?"
You are the kind of jackass who calls me bitching that you aren't getting good speed while you are downloading at 118KBps from download.com, cause they thought a mebagit was 1024KBps not 1024Kbps.
What, me worry?
Actually, when talking about bits it is base 10 counting - so a megabit per second is actually 1000000 bits per second (it is based on Time not on registers and memory addresses so there's no need to use base 2)
You're the kind of jackass who calls me saying your not getting good speed because your 100Mbps direct ethernet connection is only getting 2MBps of data throughput, cause you forgot to calculate each layer's overhead value.
What, me worry?