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Replace NAT Box with Commercial Broadband Router?

Posted by Cliff on from the if-it-ain't-broke dept.

hjf asks: "Three years ago, when I got DSL, I set up a 486 box, with 8 megs and a floppy drive to run FloppyFW. It has been through a couple hardware upgrades: 16Mb RAM for running the 2.4 kernel and a 100MBit PCI NIC for the internal network. It has a little UPS which lasts for over 60 minutes. The only downtime it has is when there's a thunderstorm and I unplug it. Besides that, it has been running flawlessly since I set it up. Lately I have been kind of seduced with this product from 3Com, and other similar to it. I know it says it can handle 253 simultaneous users and all that. My home network has 4 users, but most of us run eMule and other P2P, and as many of you know, those P2P programs can beat the crap out of your router." "For example, the default NAT table of my box wasn't enough (syslog reported TABLE FULL - DROPPING PACKET), so I made it 32768 entries and that message doesn't appear anymore. Now, what I'd like to know is, how big is that router's (or any other which does that kind of job) NAT table? Will it handle that many concurrent connections? I know I'll lose most of Linux's flexibility but I think I can live with that, but I'd surely win lots of room in the closet. So Slashdot, what's your opinion about all this?"

3 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. stick with what you've got by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whoa, you want to replace a simple, working firewall, which is open-source, understood by you, and which costs next to nothing, with a closed-source, commercial, EULA-encumbered device with arbitrary limits, unknown functionality, guaranteed to work only with Windows, but in a shiny branded box?

    Damn, if you're not a manager now, you're in the wrong line of work!

    I mean, you're seduced by this kind of crap?

    IP functions such as PPTP/PPPoE, NAT, and DHCP enhance addressing privacy and economy

    Wow! Enhanced addressing privacy! And Economy! Both in one sleek white box!

    Hacker pattern detection firewall feature automatically detects and blocks denial-of-service attacks and other common intrusions

    I can just imagine that sophisticated technology.. if packets/second exceed X, start dropping packets randomly....

  2. Why? by josh3736 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    from the if-it-ain't-broke dept.

    I think that says it all. The box you have now works just fine, so why ditch it for a less flexable consumer-grade router?

    Do any of those Linksys boxes have ssh? Nope. Stick with the PC.

  3. fan failure - no network by jkujawa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    About three years ago, the fan failed on my (almost entirely silent) Linux-based NAT box. I didn't find this out until the cascading failures took down the whole box.

    I replaced it with a Linksys router. I've been happy ever since.
    Set it up and forget about it.

    I'm a coder. I've also done enough sysadmin that it pisses me off when I have to do it at work, and more so when I have to do it at home. Plug-it-and-forget-it is awfully nice.

    Spending $50 on a router, is also more economical than working on one for several hours. My time is not free.