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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. Upgrade to a Pentium Laptop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Get a Pentium laptop, and you will still get the flexability of linux, and you will save room.

  2. Re:What I use by f()rK()_Bomb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I really have to add a vote for smoothwall , where i used to work (government office) Me and rest of the IS section used to regularly beat the hell out the SOHO firewall. My sysadmin wanted to "upgrade" to a big,better,faster sonicwall product (the previous sonicwall product liked to download firmware upgrades and crash itself. Nice) I just said give me 2 hours and i will have i new firewall running. He laughed and said thats something id love to see. 2 hours later after hunting in the basement for p166 and downloading smoothwall there is very little we can throw at it that it cant handle , sysadmin is now a manager. Great }:-) Where am i ? Pretty much quit at that stage. Recently nmapped their network , ports open now include such gems as 135,137,21,25,1433 & 6669. WTF

    --
    "The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980
  3. Re:Linsys WRT54G by eludias · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Or even better, a ASUS wl500g (~$90) -- it even contains a USB connector to connect any USB device Linux can use.

    It has the same broadcam chipset as the Linksys, btw. (...which is closed source, so you're bound to run 2.4 forever).

    http://forum.chupa.nl/ has a forum about it for background information (custom firmware for ssh, samba, ...).