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Home Router For High-Speed Connection?
soulprivate writes "My cable company has recently begun to offer Internet access plans with speeds over 30 Mbps (60, 80 and 100 Mbps). However my D-link router is unable to go beyond 30 Mbps if I use NAT; it reaches 60-70 Mbps only if NAT is disabled. Is there any recommendation for a brand/model of residential router that is able to get more than 70 Mbps with NAT enabled? I have been looking for benchmarks or comparisons, to no avail. Does anyone know one? What are your experiences at home?"
You could do what I do: use a compact computer with two NICs (motherboard NIC plus a PCI 3Com NIC) as the firewall. Run Devil-Linux from a read-only device. Then, the inside of your firewall can be a gigabit switch. Devil-Linux is pretty easy to configure, although perhaps not quite as easy as a consumer firewall/router with a good web-based GUI. You can boot Devil-Linux from a CD drive, with a write-protected floppy holding your settings; you can roll a custom CD with the settings burned onto it; or you can use a write-protected USB flash drive for everything. No hard drive is needed.
Pro: Fastest possible throughput and lowest latency; excellent security.
Con: Will consume more electricity at idle than a consumer firewall/router box.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Thanks for the advice! Too bad it's incorrect and you apparently just wrote something to see your name here. There's no reason for the brand-name ones or any one (they all buy and rebrand from the same Chinese OEM developers anyway) to maintain speeds faster than the fastest broadband connections on the market. This has been cheap and easy so far, since the market in this case suck at delivering fast speeds.
It's common knowledge among those of us that have 100/100 at home that those routers just can't keep up. They usually also lack RAM to track enough connections to saturate the bandwidth with torrent downloads or similar.
I'd set up openwrt or distro-of-your-choice (m0n0wall was nice last time I looked at these things) on a small and silent PC with two network cards, mini-itx or such. That would give you the prestanda and flexibility you want.
c++;
Absolutely true. Pfsense is awesome!
The challenge is keeping your "old server" hardware alive without having staff supporting/monitoring it.
Sure, good HW can keep churning for quite some time, but sooner or later the HD will die. Or the PSU will grow tired. Maybe a fan will die and leave the system overheated? When compared to a brand spanking new dedicated unit I believe one can get away with less human monitoring. Of course, as always, YMMV.
Then again, should you have the resources available, pfsense or m0n0wall are the bomb. Seriously.
How about using an old laptop, or a low-end refurb netbook. Either should have the processing power required, has low power consumption, and can run other services (media server) if required.
What website do you expect to give you more than a 30Mbps connection?!
Website(s) plural. The neat thing about the net is you can have mulitple connections going, which is extra neat if you have more than one computer. Me personally, I'd use that to sync with the server at work so I have a bunch of stuff at home to access. Fun stuff.
Frankly, though, I'm not sure why you're asking. "You're paying for a really fast connection, but couldn't you just settle for half of it?" How would you respond to somebody suggesting you disable one of your cores?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I have a WRT54GL and a 100/10 conection as well, and I can also confirm that getting above 30-40 Mbps is difficult. With some tweaking seems to be possible to reach 50 perhaps, but then the CPU simply won't handle more traffic. Enabling QoS or other features will obviously decrease this value even more. At first I thought I might have misconfigured something, but after a lot of googling this really seems to be the capacity limit of these routers.
Looking for an alternative that's quiet, low power and linux friendly I came across the Routerstation Pro http://www.ubnt.com/products/rspro.php. It runs the same linux-based firmwares as the WRT line of routers, but with a CPU clocked more than 3 times as high, more RAM and expansion possibilities etc. I have not tested it yet though, but reviews seems promising, routing 100 Mpbs should not be a problem.
doesn't make sense anymore - those projects all took advantage of spare clockcycles which were being provided anyway, and not being used. Modern CPUs throttle themselves right down if they're not loaded, and running a project like that just makes them run at full power when they don't need to. I was running rosetta@home 24/7 on my Q6600, until I realised that it was thrashing my system's cooling so hard that it was making ~ 3x more noise than it needed to be. Luckily I shut it off before I did any mechanical damage to the fans and my system is whisper-quiet again.
Anyway, to bring this back on topic. OP could try rolling his own. (Note: I haven't done this, I don't know whether it would work, and those look frightfully expensive. It just looks like it would be a neat toy, and a geeky talking point)
FGD 135
Yet another interesting alternative is to run your router on a VM. In my case, I also needed to have a file server, an Asterisk server, a web server, virtual desktop, etc, it made sense for me to also run the router on a VM. I built an i7 box with 12GB of RAM and 2x1TB disks for about 900 bucks, installed the free ESXi 4U1 and separate NIC cards for each interface and a virtual DMZ. The box is a rocket, and I now that covers all my needs with a single computer in the house.