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Powerful Linux ISP Router Distribution?
fibrewire writes "I'm building a Wireless ISP using commercial grade, low cost equipment. My main stumbling block is that I cannot find a decent open source ISP class routing distribution. Closest thing to even a decent tool is Ubiquiti's AIRControl — but even it doesn't play well with other network monitoring software. I've used Mikrotik's RouterOS for five years, but it just isn't built for what I need. I don't mind paying licensing fees, but $300K for a Cisco Universal Broadband Router is out of my budget. Has anyone seen any good open-source/cheap hardware/software systems that will scale to several thousand users?"
Just pick up your favorite Linux distribution and get back to me with your requirements. I think Linux can easily do what you need almost out of the box. It is only a matter of configuring it. I bet some would recommend looking at OpenBSD or FreeBSD as well.
Either way, you would definitely have a more flexible solution that any canned product will provide you with.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index
It's Linux on low cost wireless routers.
http://www.vyatta.com/about/press_releases.php?id=75
try the beta v6
http://www.vyatta.com/
So AirControl "doesn't play well with other network monitoring software" (which one, and why?), and MikroTik "isn't built for what [you] need" (what's that?) - other than that, you don't give us any idea what you really expect. What are your requirements? Suggestions out of the blue: OpenWRT with quagga/zebra, hostapd, radius, olsrd, b.a.t.m.a.n. etc. etc, or you might want to have a look at Vyatta (no affiliation).
Why does it have to be linux? Use pfSense
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
So Cisco makes billions of dollars a year selling some ungodly expensive, ungodly powerful head end router like devices (not even routers in the IP sense) and somehow you suspect a Linux distribution with the same features is going to unpack itself and be everything you want it to be? You need to tell us what the rest of your platform looks like if you expect any answers that go beyond 'any linux distribution can act like a router!'. What subscriber equipment is in use? How much user control do you need (access on/off vs. bandwidth filtering, etc.) Details, details, details.
Without more performance and cost requirements, it's really hard to figure out what would work for you.
Are your users all in one building? Over a large area? Are you talking about a dozen access points or hundreds?
Without some more specific information, only advice I can give is:
Soekris boxes with FreeBSD.
Good luck.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
I use it, it works really well.
http://www.vyatta.org/
http://www.provantage.com/cisco-systems-ubr7111~7CSCR275.htm
up to 2000 users for $8942.32
just buy a couple of them with a bunch of linksys wrt54gl's running tomato or tomatovpn and you will be all set.
Vyatta is pretty good, although the firewall rules can get overly verbose quickly. Also pfSense might be good to look at.
http://www.vyatta.com/
http://www.vyatta.com/
I'm building a Wireless ISP using commercial grade, low cost equipment.
To me, some words in this sentence seem to be mutually exclusive.
To my humble opinion, a good ISP needs to have good reliable equipement. Sometimes, out of the box routers are better because they don't have moving parts and their firmware could be more stable than a full-blown OS (even if it is Linux).
Disclaimer: Not that I don't like Linux, I use it all the time.
Sorry to be blunt, but you're asking the wrong question.
The proper question is: How do I find someone qualified to do this for me?
The fact that you are asking on slashdot shows that you are not qualified, and what you're going to get back is a bunch of others, who aren't qualified, suggesting all sorts of half assed hacks to do it which will just result in a utterly shitty service overall.
You could get by with this in the late 90s, but when you're going to compete with cell phone companies, cable companies and standard POTS companies, you probably need to have a bit of a clue.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Maybe Vyatta @ http://www.vyatta.org/ does what you want. I really don't have any idea what that is from the actual post, tho. You need some routing for thousands of users, and can't afford a Cisco UBR. I'm not sure exactly if you wanted to use the UBR for DOCSIS type support for some reason (a la cable modem) but the fact it'll be wireless leads me to believe it won't be. I'm assuming you don't need a lot of physical ports, just something to manage your VLANS, some routed subnets, a bit of BGP, etc. Maybe XORP is what you want, tho @ http://www.xorp.org/ so you may want to look there. IHeck, 'm not even sure if you want to take a server with a bunch of PCIe ports and slam multiport switchable fabric cards in there like the ones DSS @ http://www.dssnetworks.com/v3/gigabit_pcie_6468.asp makes, or do something else. Maybe these links will help, and hopefully there'll be a detailed followup so we can aim at the real target :)
Routing and ISP's are huge topics- what are you trying to do?
The main problem with routing isn't bandwidth- anyone can pump enough 1500 or 9000 byte frames per second to fill a gigabit pipe. The problem is when you have lots of small packets. At that point, dedicated routing hardware with a high-speed TCAM becomes really important.
What kind of line cards do you need? ADSL? Ethernet? OC12?
What kind of services do you need to run? BGP? OSPF?
What kind of bandwidth are you going to be pushing?
Maybe this will work for you. On my linux box, I entered `yum search ospf` and it came back with a package called 'quagga'. I did a Google search and found they have a website. According to the website, they support OSPF and BGP.
Start off small. Pick up some used Cisco stuff off Ebay at 1% list. Maybe a 6500 with a couple of SUP2s for your core switch, a couple or four 7200s for the upstreams/customer facing bits. Make lots of money, upgrade to newer stuff as needed.
You say: " I've used Mikrotik's RouterOS for five years, but it just isn't built for what I need."
What exactly isn't it built for?
Mikrotik has numerous large WISP's (+5000 seats) running on Mikrotik Software and hardware.
Have you contacted Mikrotik's engineers with your "problem"?
Give pfSense a try. http://www.pfsense.org/ Also a VERY active user forum at http://forum.pfsense.org/
I have to agree, although I registered a vote for PFSense above. PFS is based on m0n0wall and both are excellent routers filling slightly different niches. I currently use PFS at home for its packages (freeswitch, squid), but I recently worked for a growing WISP and got them onto m0n0wall, now serving something in the neighbourhood of a thousand customers.
If you want pure simplicity, go m0n0wall. Otherwise, I strongly recommend looking at PFSense for the squid caching and adjust-on-the-fly connection table size.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
There's a small wireless ISP located in the Big Sur area of California that seems to have been up and running for a few years now. Maybe the OP wants to build a system like Big Sur Wireless. Their web site includes a lot of details about their homebrew system.
I use pfSense and it works reasonably well. I was looking also for something more sophisticated. ClearOS (http://www.clearfoundation.com/) looks like nice judging the screen shots but I haven't had a chance to try it. Did anyone tried ClearOS? feedback?
I am not sure what you are asking. I have used a linux or freebsd home router for years. You can configure either rather simply with the information available on the net including firewall filtering. I am sure you could use 1000mb ethernet cards and make a super fast router with either OS. Linux is a little more hardware friendly than freebsd. As others have said, more information on specifics will get you specific answers.
Part of the reason why you pay for Cisco is for support. If something fails you can get a replacement quick. If you dont mind spending a little more you can get a replacement delivered to you while TAC sits on a bridge with you. You also have the option of delivering it on a silver platter.
If your seriously looking at going the ISP level, you shouldn't be messing around with second-hand or non-isp class hardware.
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You could always try contacting a company that actually does this for themselves and provides hardware/software for others to do the same thing. I'd -highly- recommend going with a mesh-based technology to add redundancy to your infrastructure. Cambridge Matrix has some pretty good kit.
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What's your interface to the net, line cards, bandwidth expectations, etc. I spent 5 years building a fairly heavy duty wISP network on a stupid low budget from my boss. You can obtain used cisco stuff for cheap. For instance, you can get your hands on a 7206vxr with a NPE-G1 for $10k or less nowadays... If you need something with high redundancy do do less intensive switching, you can pick up a 6509 with a pair of SUP2-MFSC2 cards for less than $2k. As far as support contracts go, I can't imagine that you need the latest and greatest IOS, let alone a support contract that costs more than the replacement of a piece of hardware. On a side note... why are you asking about the uBR series? Are you not running an ethernet network? Last I checked, there's no such thing as "low cost commercial grade." Depending on where you are, unlicensed stuff may not cut it, dealing with interference etc. And licensed hardware is certainly not cheap. With wireless, as well as so many other areas, you get what you pay for.
Macs, Linux, Windows... who cares, they all suck at something.
If you are going to be a business, I think your going to need a better business plan first.
It almost feels like you have this great idea but have not sat down and wrote down exactly what you are going to do and how are you going to get there. Talk to the small business administration, they have people there that you should talk to first.
You have selected the hardware before finding the software that will accomplish the task.
OpenBSD-current is the way to go. Excellent routing performance, very strong BGP and OSPF implementations, and BGP MPLS VPN support is almost complete in current too.
OpenBSD 4.6 has a few significant OSPF bugs that are resolved in current. Also slightly lower routing performance.
What are you trying to do that Mikrotik can't do ?
Okay, clearly you have no idea what you're talking about, because a Cisco Universal Broadband Router is a bit of kit used to terminate DOCSIS lines. In other words, it's for cable-modem broadband, not wireless. It would be useless to you.
That said, for others who're reading and who might be interested in some high-end, Linux-based packet-processing kit (because really, the prices Cisco and Juniper and the rest of them charge really are past the ass-raping point of the screw-me spectrum), you could check out Vyatta: http://www.vyatta.com/
Enjoy. HTH.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I did not see anyone suggest http://www.untangle.com/ . i have only played with it for a short time, but it might be worth checking out!
I'm gonna go with "zeroshell" zeroshell.org. It appears to clearly favor security, configurability and ease of use. Additionally, the developers have a clear understanding of networks and what is really necessary to get things done.
http://ipcop.org
Why bother with a high-maintainance OS system for a router?? Just buy a refurbed Cisco from a reseller. You won't get support from Cisco but you can buy the router and a spare second-hand for 5% of the original cost.
My history is: started on OBSD (due to hardware support, ironically); played w/ FBSD; ended up on pfSense.
My observations:
OBSD is absurdly security conscious... for ISPs especially, this is a good thing.
OBSD tends to have a lot of focus on new network features (pf, carp)
most OBSD features get ported to FBSD... but take time (look into carpdev)
pfSense (built on FBSD) has some overhead vs FBSD raw (obviously), but has *nice* management UI, package support, etc ;)
customizations are easy for pfSense (I added some features to dhcpd a while back)... easier than generating the diff and submitting it
pfSense is more focused on network features (they're working on fixing carpdev for FBSD)
I like pfSense a lot... I use it for routing between ~6 VLANs, IPSec tunnels with another pfSense, PPTP server, *tight* firewall rules (given 6 VLANs).
pfSense 2 will be adding a lot of nice features for businesses (multiple admin accounts, different permission levels, etc)
What about Vyatta? It's a good router based on linux and you can install it on any old box you want or buy their hardware for it. Even has a cisco like interface if you want.
Why not buy used Cisco routers? In the current economy, you should be able to make some pretty sweet deals.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You can make ssh plugins with Nagios, AirOS supports ssh and key exchange. You should be able to achieve most things with that combination, what is it you are trying to do?
MicroTik has a strong API, have you tried doing what you need to do by using that?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
RuralLink Ltd (yes, I work for them) does what you want, linux-based wireless network management. Get in touch with us at http://www.rurallink.co.nz/contact-us
There's not a lot of info about that side of things on the website, but if you contact us we'll be happy to chat - and don't worry, we're all techs, there's no sales droids here.
Cheers,
Scott.
I founded and operate a wireless ISP serving about 1000 wireless subscribers, and have my own embedded linux distro inside just about everything. It would be a fair statement to say that linux literally saved our business on more than one occasion, by giving us the tools to overcome manufacturer software bugs, by establishing 'known good' systems of various types, by enabling read-only compact flash based systems running on solar power, by bringing a high level of utility and reliability into the critical parts of the network, by allowing us to make it anything it needed to be.
As a CPE, my linux distro never lets me down and never puts customers of at risk of 'stone dead - lights on but nobody home', like linksys/netgear/etc always seem to. Never having to tell someone 'just pull the power and plug it back in' for their connectivity is a real saving grace. And when in a business situation, I can equip these customers with connectivity devices that _do not fail_ and make us look stupid, while at the same time giving them useful feature sets unavailable in higher end router manufacturer gear (cisco 2621 - excellent hardware with great stabillity, just weak on features I get with dnsmasq, openvpn, tcpdump and others.. trying to diagnose network connectivity issues without tcpdump is just dumb.). Its also never choked and zeroed out it's own flash config for no goddam rason, unlike the previously mentioned low-end consumer devices frequently do. Basically, that consumer stuff puts you at risk and is suicide.
As a network appliance, linux flings packets just fine and gives you great tools to filer, mangle and generally control how and what it does. The ebtables code is awesome, the iptables stuff is killer, openvpn rocks asses, dnsmasq kills, there's just too many useful and cool things just go right. I have a pppoe server running rp-pppoe + my patches and userspace tools, running for years now and hit with every kind of client side bug and malfunction imaginable, and just keeps trucking along. Freeradius backed up with mysql is sweet as can be, and quagga for distributing my routes internally is just a dream. I have it all on read-only compact flash, so they never write and basiclaly will run until there is a show stopper hardware problem, at which point I will more than likely be able to remove the flash and put it into another machine and away I go.
There is a lack of management interface, and there is a learning curve to this route, but the upside is very low dollar cost and an attainable level of flexibillity, reliabillity and stabillity you are unlikely to find in any commercial solution anywhere. Cisco IOS is awesome, but you won't power anything that runs it off a 12v battery and solar panel on the side of a mountain and flinging/filtering 20mbps of traffic.
Good luck.
The need reminds me of this guy: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/1101/064.html But... never heard anything about him since 2004.
I guess i'm looking for a scalable ISP-in-a-box solution. And if it doesn't exist, then let's build one. But Proxmox VE looks like it will fit well with managing computer resources between the handful of Dell 2950s slated for Zimbra, FreeIPA (Active Directory for Linux), Nagios, Cacti, and AIRControl. Still looking for a good FreeRADIUS server i can tie into FreeIPA - but i need lots of other stuff than just a router-in-a-box. A balance between smartest / practicality / economical directly translates into cost savings of the end user. Someday i will be able to provide free internet, but for now i am targeting $20-$40 a month for data, voice, video, and multicast TV. Some features of a good OSS router needing attention are:
* PowerPC vs X86 vs GPU - does routing perform better on PowerPC (Mikrotik / Vyatta / Cisco)? would an Nvidia Tesla solution work well?
* Easy to manage large scale routing implementations - speed of deployment, discovery of devices, failover, centrally monitored?
* Weatherproof - power outages, network hiccups, etc. nothing more irritating than going on-site to an AP to reboot in the middle of a storm
For more details about a specific area please ask.
away.
CRS1 maybe, but not CMTS routers.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Heck, that's the "not so open source model"! Build crap and give it away for free, then charge out the wazoo for "support".
Well, it's a good business model anyways. :)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
You mention the UBR (Universal Broadband Router) specifically in your remarks. The UBR 10K which the poster refers to is not only a router but a CMTS (Cable Modem Termination System) as well. I guarantee you will not be able to turn a Linux box with some PCI cards into a DOCSIS head-end serving one cable modem let alone thousands of cable subscribers. You are way out of your league if you need service provider grade gear and 300k scares you.
Alright - I read your question, then a couple responses - but it isn't clear here that you're asking the question correctly. Humor me for a moment, then decide whether you asked the right question.
You have access to the web, with a hardware router behind the modem. That hardware router services both wireless and wired LANs, right?
You want to set up a router behind that router? You still won't be able to monitor traffic going through that hardware router. You need to put your *nix router between the modem and the hardware router, so that you become the gateway for all traffic going to and from the internet.
Of course, that is still not satisfactory if you wish to monitor traffic within the LAN. For that, you want to eliminate the hardware router entirely. Install the hardware to make your *nix router serve the WIFI and the wired LAN, and eliminate that hardware router entirely.
You can only monitor and control traffic that is being gated through your router, so you want it ALL to be routed through your box!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Are there any OpenBGP that i could tie into a web management interface like Ubiquiti's AirControl?
Actually this isn't a bad solution, the interface is acceptable - but no real routing power behind it. Am i mistaken?
Great model, but i need expensive licenses to do any real routing.
How about a list of components that would be needed to, let say, take on time warner with a wireless ISP? Lets make it as detailed as possible.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_1/12_1xm/feature/guide/ftwrlsmc.html http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/wireless/ps2360/prod_installation_guide09186a00800d9d79.html AKA known as the Cisco WT2700 Wireless system. Which was end-of-lifed almost 3.5 years ago, so I wouldn't see why anybody would be putting in one of these systems anymore.
Valuable input - if you have any other ISP experience please post here. I'm going to put together a collection of ideas from this slashdot article and try to build a routing system using this information.
Thank You
Everyone seems satisified with Wal-Mart. But where is Service Merchandise nowadays? Or more recently, Circuit City?
Exactly.
Thanks :-)
Anything that could steer me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated
--
Original Poster
I'm building a WISP, too. Do you think I should get a T-1 or a DS-3 for Internet? I haven't been able to decide between BSD and Linux for my router operating system. I think I'm going to go with Linux because I think the penguin mascot is cuter than that Satan mascot, but it's easier to get BSD to run on a 486 these days.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Have you tried Meraki? Google bought into the company awhile ago and it all runs on Linux. There are proprietary bits nowadays so you can't put your own distro in place of the original code. However less than $200 for solid, lifetime warranty, outdoor gear is nice. The built in meshing control is impressive. The ranges with omni antennas are great. Also millions of users have connected to the 'net via meraki equipment according to the website. I'm currently writing this on a meraki mesh, 4th hop from the gateway, without a hiccup.
I know it's fun to roll your own solution. If it's for your own personal needs I'd say go ahead with any of the variety of open source projects doing this. If you absolutely don't want a closed source then look at http://www.open-mesh.com/. It took the concept of Meraki and went totally open source. It's a neat idea but having transferred over a terabyte on meraki gear I'm completely happy and wouldn't want the headaches of hardware and software not backed by a commercial company.
Good luck on your WISP venture. As anyone in the ISP field will tell you - you're gonna need it!
Security as always as an after thought. This should be a foundation for your plans. If you don't care about exposing your customers to every half competent wardriver or script kiddy wifi cracker going then any distro and hardware can potentially do. If you wan to instill your customers with a sense of security while on your network you need to lay out the proper security framework first. We have a local wisp who is using OOB mid grade hardware and leasing tower space from local towers. One issue a client of mine recently had was mac address spoofing. They found out after bringing in the proper people that someone down the road was using a yagi and about $500 worth of hardware to get free internet. It could have been worse but it could have been avoided. Please try to think about getting the right security [i]and[/i] "good open-source/cheap hardware/software " in place if you haven't already
Seriously, learn to love FreeBSD.
I am assuming that you will be doing a tree style network with a central location providing you bandwidth on a fiber link or T1/T3 etc.
Get a PAIR(at least, add more as necessary) of nice, quad core Dell Poweredge or HP DL series servers. FreeBSD+CARP them giving you as seamless load balancing/fail over as you can realistically get.
at each hub consider either buying commercial wireless routers or build your own. If you build just keep everything fanless as that is where your equipment will fail you.
Use OSPF on branches while being aware of scaling issues and where OSPF isnt ideal, kick in the BGP and you can link your OSPF clusters together giving an extra level on branch redundancy because traffic can hop to another branch if necessary.
OLSR in mesh cells, OSPF on the cells backhaul router linking these cells and providing multiple route options for redundancy, and BGP between groups of cells and between you and other ISPs etc etc.
You dont need to take the Mesh down to the client, only to the neighborhood AP level. The idea of mesh per client creates too many hopps and clients have too much latency. Ideally, you are no more that a 2-4 hops from the backbone, any more and you are going to be adding too much latency from the hops. When a backhaul link goes down and the OSPF saves your butt by routing traffic through a neighboring cell, you are already going to add latency and you dont need that complicated by 6 hops in the neighborhood and 5 more to the backbone (11 hops over wireless is just too many for broadband).
I believe you may be onto something that would suit my needs for this Wireless ISP perfectly.
Do you know of any commodity TCAM hardware?
Maybe i can run RTLinuxFree on it?
http://www.rtlinuxfree.com/
and then i could put XORP on top of it
http://www.xorp.org/
or... i answered my own question...
intel xscale cpus and powerpc based routing platforms (most single board computers) are all i really need.
http://gateworks.com/
http://routerboard.com/
http://www.adiengineering.com/
RB1000 from Mikrotik supports 400,000 pps and 4 gigabit ports for $700
Take that Cisco
OpenBSD has been used as a router in enterprise environments. Check out http://www.openbsd.org/ or their OpenOSPF and OpenBGP implementations. They strive to be lean, standards compliant, and meet the broadest set of routing criteria. Coincidentally, OpenBSD has an incredibly easy to configure IPSEC stack as well as tools for router redundancy called CARP.
Your questions reveals why Cisco is still in business.
If you want a great platform that is portable check out Zebos from IP Infusion. I run it on several systems and find its features great. I honestly have no idea what it costs though but I'm sure it is less than that switch from Cisco.
Runs on Linux Kernel 2.6 or several other OSes.
Have fun!
Try Pfsense
Alpine Linux, a small, secure and powerful distro with good quagga/bgpd support.
I looked at Vyatta, but didn't see what it offered that quagga didn't. There was also no way to install it from within an existing debian distro, even though it's based on debian. Vyatta corporate sales people couldn't provide me any benchmarks against other routing solutions, saying they don't believe in benchmarks. Not really the best way to make a sale. So they didn't. But perhaps someone here can offer some reason to use it instead of deb/quagga.
As far as hardware goes, when you are building an x86 based router, make sure you have good ethernet cards. Run GigE if possible, even if you aren't running that much data through it, you'll appreciate the lower latency. Use reliable equipment - parity ram and lots of it, raid, well-tested, server grade boards (and not some cheapo $100 desktop board). Better to use an old xeon over a newer CPU that doesn't have much cache. Run as little extra software as possible on the router...i.e. have another server for firewall / IDS / monitoring. Keep it simp,e ya know? Of course, if rack space is costly you might want to reconsider that special-purpose setup. Document your config files by using comments, with your initials and the date. Every route should have comments indicating what it is for.
I work for an ISP and we are using linux based routers from ImageStream (http://www.imagestream.com) or you can simply use any distro and configure it according to your needs.
Astaro Community is free, linux based, germab developers, it's great and it checks for updates. the limit is only on the number of hosts.
FAR cheaper than Cisco and not a self sustaining ecosystem like Cisco. (Cisco charges tech/company to learn, tech/company charges you for the device that you cannot configure, tech/compay charges you etc, it never ends cause you can't configure them) The reason that companies LOVE to sell Cisco gear is they will have someone on staff to configure it, and that is where they make their money. Not many people have the ability to configure Cisco routers, web interface on them or not.
SO, if you purchase one, you will be forever paying when something needs to be changed or upgraded. The only people that buy Cisco gear anymore are those that are afraid to be responsible for their choice. As a consultant I have heard the speech several times, CIsco must be the best, its what everyone uses.
Let those that truly understand their job be the ones to lead the way out of the world we live in where companies like Cisco get you from every end after the purchase.
From a technical standpoint, they do have a good product that functions well, there is no reason for it to be so difficult to manage though.
I do miss the days of Novell when a GUI was not on every computer, but thats not where the industry is now, everything has a GUI to configure it
Yes, I can trudge my way through a Cisco, and yes it takes me much longer than someone who is a CCNA or just had training on a specific router.
I can do it much faster in an interface like an Astaro.
I also put in a vote for FreeBSD if Astaro is not an option for you.
Women and Alcohol are good seperatly, but mix 'em and they turn you into a dumbass
You are aware that PFsense is 'just' a crunchgen binary. It's a great distro and even has a packaging system, but the routing question could be answered with putting PF, an sftp subsystem like from dropbear, and BGP into a crunchgen binary using NetBSD or OpenBSD rather than FreeBSD. It's only hard the first time, if you keep notes. Even then its not so daunting.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Try Astaro
http://www.astaro.com/
It's not free but they offer hardware and software solutions. They are open source based and are a good FOSS player. They seem to have products that should be able to scale up to what you want. I got a copy running at home and it works great.
Try vyatta, it can be usefull.
Regards
Have you tried IPCOP? http://www.ipcop.org
The web site isn't flashy, but stick the disk onto a machine with 2 network cards and you've got yourself something that can handle a hell of a lot more than dd-wrt on a Linksys!
The GUI isn't bad either.
If monitoring is what you want, why don't you use SNMP, Nagios, & Cacti on a Linux server attached to your system? SNMP is supported by Microtik and Ubiquiti. Setting up SNMP and Nagios isn't the easiest thing in the world but they're free and work very well.
Vyata builds open source routing. http://www.vyatta.com/products/software_subscriptions.php
You're missing the point of what the purpose of a router is. A router is supposed to copy a packet from one interface to another based on certain routing criteria as quickly as possible. That's it. Period. Nothing else. All other services need to be placed elsewhere in the network based on the tiered network model of core, distribution, and edge. Otherwise, you will never have a scalable, redundant network.
Check out Vyatta dot com at http://www.vyatta.com/
The real question you should be asking yourself is if you really want to get into the wireless ISP game. It is pretty late in the game at this point with CLEAR rolling out WiMax service(yes I have heard the negative reviews), docsis 3 and fiber to the home solutions becoming more prevalent. It is a rough time to be getting started. That being said I agree with some of the previous posters that your core equipment should really be Cisco. Think used 6500s and 7200s. I know that a 6500 with sup32s can handle multiple hundreds of mbps of traffic for thousands of users, but it depends on your usage scenario. In this case I would keep the Mikrotiks at the edge as it is quite the mature platform(not that I haven't spent countless nights trying to figure out why it behaves the way it does). If you absolutely must run open source for your core, investigate Vyatta on high end hardware. It is not as mature, but the community is very good and helpful. You might also consider the zebra project for just straight routing.