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FreeBSD Based Gaming Router
Zaphoid writes "Lan Game Reviews has posted an article on how to use an old computer and FreeBSD distro m0n0wall to create a gaming router. Gaming routers allow users to use their full bandwidth for downloads and other high bandwidth apps, and low latency applications at the same time. By keeping packet queues on the router side, rather than the modem side. Users are able to achive great pings in online games, while fully using their download bandwidth. This is a great alternitive to expensive gaming routers on the market today."
"This is a great alternitive to expensive gaming routers on the market today."
:)
Yes, this is exactly what the gaming world has been waiting for. The funny thing is that when somebody tries to create a product that is designed for USERS, they complain. However, when you design something so obscure out of your own whim that might never be used by anybody else, that is considered cool. Discuss.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Interesting, but I don't know how well this is going to work, given FreeBSD's crappy TCP-IP stack. ^_^
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Such routers seem to be under $100.
& btnG=Search+Froogle
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=gaming+router
I don't see how a loud, hot old PC is necessarily better. And if you want an embedded system, those are normally quite pricey.
I'm not convinced that using an old PC is the best way to go here. Hacking a WRT* might seem more reasonable -- but a lot trickier.
I really don't like having lots of big boxes around, humming. But then I don't like games either.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Gamers aren't likely to spend time they could be gaming with installing, configuring and maintaining a router setup. It's far more sensible, in today's age of commodity broadband routers, to pick up a Linksys WRT54G or similar from a local supplier and use that instead, a simple and out-of-the box solution that should require fairly little maintainance after installation and won't require an entire machine sitting humming away in the corner just to route packets. The WRT54G specifically makes a great case for this, because it can be flashed with different open source firmware to improve its flexibility and stability.
In other situations, the dedicated machine would probably have a numerous array of other uses, making it a more useful overall package, but since this article focuses on gaming the box running FreeBSD is unlikely to be able to be used for gameplay, so its pretty much relegated to packet routing and other miscellaneous duties. That, to me, seems like a complete waste in this instance
Business Voyeur
I don't see how a loud, hot old PC is necessarily better.
Not to mention power consumption is certainly worse.
Guys (and the few but very welcome gals), before we all start flaming about how hard it is to set up OpenBSD/FreeBSD and a firewall for a newbie, please take a look at the m0n0wall site. m0n0wall is completely self contained and is very easy to set up. It is completely web interface driven and is managed in much the same way as a consumer broadband router is. m0n0wall is, in my humble opinion having used it for a number of years and loveing it, and excellent firewall product and is very capable. If you have not seen it, grab a copy and have a look. Cheers, Tim.
Part of the hacker mindset is a love of tinkering -- the fantastic knowledge that you don't need anyone's help to create, to build, to acheive, to overcome. That with that computer that was going to be in the dumpster, you can now do something cool, regardless of the fact that it might take you longer to do it.
You have a point, but the problem is that it strikes at a target that doesn't really exist. The point of Slashdot isn't to advertise every new technology that comes out, but to advertise what is interesting to its readership. Given that a lot of us a predisposed to hacking and wonderful stuff like that, it makes sense that this should be posted here.
FTR, though, I don't think you're a troll.
I've been using monowall for probably almost a year now, for a couple different routers. Here's why I like it. Put 3 net cards in a computer. 1 for the diesel modem, 1 for the LAN, and one for the wireless access point. Block all traffic from wireless to LAN, and then allow only VPN traffic in. You have free unencrypted wi-fi for friends and neighbors, and encryption for yourself far superior to WEP.
Traffic shaping only affects UPSTREAM data.
There's unfortunatly no 100% effective way a simple user could get rid of the queues at the ISP side during heavy downloads. ICMP Source Quench were supposed to be an answer to this, but the potential exploits lead many admins to simply filter them out. IMHO, 'gaming firewalls' could ease a bit latency on assymetric lines (ADSL mostly), but true QoS can only be achieved if _both_ ends do shape their traffic (the above applies to IPv4).
As far as I've seen by experimenting myself, the benefit of such an assymetric setup is to prevent excessive pings (several seconds). Playing a FPS during heavy use is still a no go as it implies irregular ping, and an average of 100-150 ms. However, it's quite a nice setup if you plan to play some MMORPG or want to get connected through SSH.
Regards.
T-3 at work. Shared among 3 sites. No special queue or anything else. 37Mb/s for 28 minutes.
Router is FreeBSD 4.11, PIII 450 with 2 3COM 3C905B's Around 1100 lines in ipf rule set. Not very well optimized, I have 1 group. I have NAT enabled, but this is not using NAT.
Does this help for some numbers?
It's important, because although FreeBSD does have SOME of ALTQ, and SOME of KAME, it does not have the most recent code and (certainly in the case of KAME) not even all of the older code.
Some people mentioned crashes with sessions, in other posts. I couldn't prove these were due to things like ALTQ or KAME, but it is entirely plausible that it is due to something of that sort. The *BSD folk have some of the most complete, not to mention some of the most powerful, networking code out there. The problems arise when it remains out there and doesn't get merged in.
(Linux isn't much better. USAGI - an alternative IPv6 stack - is not included. SGI's STP was never really looked at. GAMMA - an excellent network layer for clusters, a common use for Linux, is barely known outside of a cult following. Same for ABISS. Web100 - a neat instrumentation layer for Linux' network code - also hasn't gone very far.)
In this day and age, there is really no excuse for poor networking code. The patches exist. The validators and instrumentation exist. The extensions and refinements all exist.
I'm one of the first to take issue with Windows folks who don't patch their systems - whether for security or for capability - and damnit, I'm not going to be any slower just because I happen to like both Linux and the *BSDs. If anything, I'm going to be faster on the draw, precisely because I do care and want these systems to really show what they're capable of.
Why do you think I ran the FOLK project for the 2.4 kernels? Because I like pain? No, it's because of the sheer volume of unknown and neglected code that could make a huge difference. The FOLK patch was getting close to the size of the kernel itself! And that was just extensions, I had very few of the maintenance patches included - some of the -ac stuff, but almost nothing from the -aa series.
If there was a chance in hell of being paid for it, I'd be happy to invest the time and effort to get either the Linux or the *BSD network code absolutely right. Someone needs to.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Who on earth said anything about it being faster? My guess is that the performance difference between dedicated hardware and PC is quite negligible. All the article said was that you can do quality-of-service queueing with regular PC hardware pretty easily, and that if you already have a spare PC, that's cheaper than buying dedicated hardware for the purpose. As far as I know, the article didn't claim that a PC was any better at the job than dedicated hardware; it just claimed that routing with quality-of-service is better than routing with it.
Getting back to the subject of performance for a moment, the low bandwidth involved in most home network connections (even if they are called "broadband") is so small that just about any computer that can run current software can handle it. Remember, computers are built to move hundreds of megabytes around in a second, and we are only talking about fractions of a megabyte.
That leaves only the issue of latency. But, on regular 10 megabit ethernet, a full-size 1536 byte frame can transmit in not much longer than 1 ms. Lots of fancy routing hardware is built so it can figure out how to retransmit a packet before the entire packet has been received, so a router could in theory add less than 1 ms of latency on 10 megabit ethernet. But even if your PC receives the whole packet and then waits a whole extra millisecond before starting to retransmit it, you've still only added 2 ms of latency, which is really not that much. At least, on my cable modem, if I ping the local university, my latency averages about 125 ms. How big of a deal is it if I had 2 ms to that?
For what it's worth, I just did two ping tests to test how much latency going through a PC does add. I first pinged the local university from my firewall machine, which is a 600 MHz Athlon running Solaris 8. The lowest ping time recorded was 9 ms. Then, I pinged the same machine from a Mac that sits inside the firewall, so that the Solaris 8 machine is routing the ICMP packets it was (in the previous test) originating. The result? The lowest ping time recorded for the Mac going through the Solaris machine was 9.178 ms. It's hard to say since the Solaris machine doesn't measure in fractions of a millisecond, but the point is that ping times were not increased dramatically. In fact, it appears to be less than one millisecond difference.
http://www.openwrt.org/
It's the most open of the alternativesd, last I looked. Not necessarily great for the lazy, though, since it will want some hand-configuring.