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Open Source Router To Replace WRT54GL?
jeremyz writes "With the inclusion of 802.11n in more and more Wi-Fi devices, the WRT54GL is losing its usefulness, even though it's still the de-facto standard for open source, Linux-running wireless routers. I've been looking around for a 802.11n router to replace the WRT54GL, but haven't really found anything besides the Netgear's WNR3500L. At first look, the WNR3500L looked great, but after some further investigation, I found that Netgear hasn't released all of the source, as they should have to comply with the GPL. Are there any good 802.11n routers to replace my aging WRT54GL?"
PC Engines' ALIX routers are my favorite: http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm
(no I don't work for them, I'm not even from Europe)
They have all kind of configuration options, removable storage, lots of case options, they're reliable and they're pretty fast. They run a few distros, including OpenWRT, so you can choose what your favorite Linux or BSD router distro is and have at it.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
DDWRT Supported Devices
CTRL+F
"b/g/n"
Conversation over.
Soekris Engineering makes low power computers that you could easily turn into a router using whatever choice of free/open source operating systems that you like. I have used OpenBSD on one of these with amazing success.
NO gig-e low number of ports and pci bus for most of them and most of them don't even have more then 1 pci slot.
to make a one that can use gig-e and n wifi pci-e is better.
There was big hype when the WRT160NL was released, since it, like the WRT54GL, has the L suffix.. and runs Linux. What happened to that one?
I was in the same situation... WRT45GL just wasn't cutting it anymore.
So I bought a small ITX board that supports PCI-E, at least 1GB of RAM, a dual-interface PCI-E network card, a case that could house it and a good gigabit switch. I currently run pfSense 1.2.3 off a 1GB USB flash drive.
I deal only with wired clients in my network so this doesn't address the Wifi portion of the question.
I'm not listing any hardware because it changes all too often.
This is the expensive route to go but I felt it was worth it for my needs.
More than likely you won't need the PCI-E dual-interface network card and an onboard dual-nic ITX board would suffice. I just happened to have mine from a previous project.
I built mine before the Intel Atom craze hit the streets. I don't know if they are powerful enough from experience although I'm sure you'd be fine.
As always with hardware and networking, YMMV.
Netgear's firmware is based on OpenWRT for this router as well, and the official OpenWRT runs on it as of Backfire 10.03. Wireless works with the ath9k open source drivers. It has great performance and works well with the open source 3rd party firmware.
You realize it's a router, not a switch, right? This is going to be hooking up to your ISP... which probably isn't anywhere near fast ethernet, let alone gigabit. If you want gigabit, hook it up to a gigabit switch. If your network edge is gigabit, get real networking hardware because nothing netgear (or PC Engines) sells is going to handle that extremely well.
As far as wifi, it's mini-pci, so you can choose whatever hardware you want. Want a really nice high watt atheros N card? You can use it and you can easily use any antenna you want as well.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
No, really, I want a direct WRT54GL successor with ADSL, n and USB for external storage or webcam. Its look, its industrial form, is simply too good to abandon... ;/
One that hath name thou can not otter
At this point I'm a bigger advocate of having a dedicated router and separate access points for wireless. Push comes to shove, get an N access point and shut the AP in your WRT down.
Pickup an old computer or laptop (I did this with an old laptop I had collecting dust) and a decent wifi card.. and set it up as a dedicated router. the total cost should be comparable to a higher end consumer wifi base (maybe even a WNR3500L) but the setup can be waaaaaayyyyy more powerful. You can put dd-wrt on it or do a custom linux/bsd setup or whatever.....numerous choices. On top of that upgrading to the newest standard is way cheaper in the future.. since its just a part swap not a full equipment switch out. Try and get a low watt pc or a laptop so long term energy costs stay down (laptop pref)
The ASUS RT-N16 is the best consumer product I've found for dd-wrt so far. 128Mb RAM and 480mHz processor, 802.11n and 2 usb ports.
Been out for a while, so there's probably something newer that's got better specs, but this is the one I remember off the top of my head.
Sig? What's that? Oh, 'signature'...and it's supposed to be witty? Right...
Keep in mind that the WRT54G's have a relatively slow CPU and couldn't even max out G. Bridging between the wifi and the built in switch is, AFAIR, a software affair, so even using it as a pure AP is less-than-full-throughput.
WNDR3700 + dd-wrt should fit well once dd-wrt is out of alpha/beta.
If you need gigabit routing, soekris is coming out with some new boards that have it, but they're 2x+ as expensive as an Alix. They aren't listed on their main page right now, i believe i heard about it through one of the community forums.
I've got an Alix 2D13 with an Atheros 5416 card in it, works fine with pfSense but the 802.11n rates don't work yet so it's still doing 54g at the moment, stable though. Hopefully once freebsd gets 802.11n rate support it will be a good router for years to come. 802.11n on this card might work in any Linux based system though, such as dd-wrt x86 (but they charge for that...)
Buffalo Technology http://www.buffalotech.com/ is my starting point for all my future networking needs. I don't need anything more than a windows compatable 802.11g router for the foreseeable future, so I have no experience with linux compatability or open source availability.
I bought a WHR-HP-G54 a few years back and am thrilled with it. I think I've only needed to reboot it twice since I bought it and neither time was the routers fault. Possibly the simplest to get working, user friendliest, least problematic piece of tech I've ever owned.
Most DSL providers will give you a bridging adapter when you subscribe, i'd rather they just give me the equipment i need to terminal an ethernet connection and take it from there.
What do you gain by keeping the ADSL connection itself inside the router?
More and more ISPs are offering consumer connections that would require gigE. Would be a bummer to get a gigabit connection for $25 a month and then have to lay out several hundred dollars to actually get that speed routed around my house.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I'm very happy with the unit for the following reasons:
1) crack it open and you can remove the wireless card and replace it with your own.
2) will run with openwrt
3) I'm shocked at the amount of abuse mine took. The wireless card had been glued to the router board using some kind of foam. I think the combination of the glue used and the heat from the device made it stick together strongly. I ended up using a pair of scissors to pry them apart and I thought for certain I had ruined either the card of the router board. Much to my surprise when I unbent the clips for the card it started working fine (I was prepared to trash the router in order to try and get the card out).
4) I've flashed the unit several times between the stock and various other images. The thing always comes back from the dead if you take your time and understand what you're doing. I guess it's firmware has some issue in how it addresses the interfaces which causes a conflict when trying to run something like FON (or so I'm told. Not certain how this applies if you're running openwrt). I bought mine a few years ago now when the N standard wasn't on a lot of hardware at the time. I haven't tested it's functionality in that regard.
I'm planning on buying a decent Atheros based card for it and use it in Sept. Hope this was helpful in some way.
Cheers, S.
Problem Solved.
http://www.trendnet.com/products/proddetail.asp?prod=185_TEW-652BRP&cat=41
Usually goes for $35
Nearly Identical to the more expensive Dlink DIR-615
Runs incredibly well on DD-WRT firmware
--or--
Compile your own firmware from Trendnet's source code.
http://www.trendnet.com/downloads/list_gpl.asp
Lack of free firmware(I need Tomato) is the reason I'm still on 802.11g in my home. I have an WRT54G as the main router and an ASUS WL-520GU creating a wireless bridge to the living room.
WRT54GL is great.... I've even got two setup in a wireless bridge that's 400meters apart.
the link says 36Mbps while actual throughput on the graphs is 18-19Mbps, half duplex of course.
A direct replacement with GigE and 802.11n along with the change-able antennas would be perfect.
C'mon Linksys, bring it on!!!!
Whether the GigE switch is integrated into the router or in a separate box, you'll still need to pay for that piece of hardware one way or the other.
Routing GigE traffic would need ASIC assisted or server class CPU if you want to do it in software.
TP-Link WR1043ND can be installed with OpenWRT or DD-WRT (beta right now, I think). This wifi router supports 802.11n and gigabit LAN. You might wanna check it out.
w00t
In part of the world I live they offer either USB "modems" or, via ridiculous premium, a router with ADSL of their choosing. Of course a model which is a complete shit usually anyway.
Less clutter (also control-wise), less PSUs, less energy used is no gain?
One that hath name thou can not otter
A few years back, I posted my notes on how to build a wifi router using Linux and a SBC (http://siso.sourceforge.net/). It served me well in the past 5 years. I am sure this can be updated with a fresh kernel and 802.11n.
I would love this too, and would buy it in an instant.
There is benefit to a smart unified home gateway.
Not everyone wants multiple devices to power, administer and troubleshoot.
Now, people who live with just one device are usually stuck with whatever their DSL provider give them -- a device with limited features or configurability.
Where can you get a gig-e connection at home?
Seriously, that's total bullshit. I don't think I've heard of a consumer connection that does over 100mbps let alone 1000mbps. Hell, even the new VDSL2+ that was reported a few days ago maxed out at around 250mbps.
If you're going to make claims like this, at least have the sense to back it up.
The ASUS RT-N16, Linksys WRT610N, and Netgear WNR3500L look promising. They're all supported by dd-wrt and in theory could work with openwrt. The Asus is some nice hardware for $90.
I'm not sure if you can install your own firmware on this, but it says it runs Linux:
http://homestore.cisco.com/en-us/Routers/Linksys-E2100L-Advanced-Wirelessn-router-linux_stcVVproductId97826162VVcatId551966VVviewprod.htm
The WRT160NL was designed to be the direct successor to the WRT54GL. It doesn't seem to have taken off, though, and while it supports Wireless N, for whatever reason, it doesn't support Gigabit Ethernet.
It's news to me too, but that 250 Mbps you're talking about indeed does require gigabit ethernet.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
There was a recent release of OpenWRT that "officially" adds support for it, for a standard consumer router its probably the best one available right now.
In the long run atheros chipsets look like the safest bet for open source, despite the hardware OEMs being sloppy. True full N support outside of binaries (let alone non-windows in general) is almost nonexistent which is where atheros is actually still making an effort.
Broadcom has been giving linux the middle finger for awhile (or forever) I don't know why some people are trying to keeping holding onto that camp. I'm looking at you, DD-WRT...
The whole linksys thing was a giant lucky fluke that had to be forced.
Similar attitudes can be found from most of the other big chip vendors.
Intel has good client blob drivers, but they don't care about master mode which is needed to do anything in an AP.
and most NAT routers can only transfer ~60Mbps
Kinda interesting no one mentioned Guruplug yet. http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.aspx
Any chance that any of these support tomato? Can't use dd-wrtafter running tomato.
Gone!
Go with OpenWRT, MUCH easier (IMO) to configure from the command line and should support the same platforms as dd-wrt.
Aaron Z
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote
Most...
There are some charts for various dsl modems showing bandwidth and connection capabilities. The units which can handle a significant amount of traffic are not in the low range regarding cost.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
The Linksys Refurbished WRT610N-RM for $110 free shipping in the US. The router might not be "open source" but you can and should load dd-wrt onto it. http://homestore.cisco.com/viewproduct.htm?productId=83108078&categoryId=85185 http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_WRT610N
One less device to manage, power, and locate space for. Why not simplify things?
RouterStation Pro has everything:
:))
-gigE
-mini pci slot for wifi cards
-enough ram for pretty much anything
(some assembly required
I do not work for them, and am not payed by them, just a happy user
i read your email
I think there was one provider overseas who stated that they intended to offer 100Mb/s to the customer. Since most of us are in the US, we aren't going to see those kinds of speeds any time soon.
I had a quick look at the Verizon FiOS site. 50Mb/20Mb was the fastest residential line they offer. For business customers, they offer a 35Mb/35Mb account if (for those serving or uploading), or the 50Mb/20Mb which would be more targeted towards offices who are downloading more than uploading.
I know businesses can buy GigE loops. It costs a fortune to get installed, and you have to have your equipment on each end. They may offer GigE service, but I'm sure that costs a larger fortune. If you're sending or receiving a 1Gb/s of traffic, you'd be peering with a Tier 1 provider. That's an OC24 circuit.
Several years ago, it was most economical for my offices to have their own T1 loops (no data service included), and stick our own routers on each end. I was very content doing a wireless link from my house to the office, and using their T1 at night. That went straight to our datacenter, so I had the luxury of assigning myself an IP from the datacenter at my house. :) I was in charge of all of that stuff, so there were no real problems doing it. I offered it to anyone in that office who had clear line of sight to the office, but no one else did.
More recently one place I worked was in a building that served as a tower for a wireless provider and they had a GigE loop in the building, and we were provided a 100Mb/s connection from them down to our suite, and paid at 95th percentile for the bandwidth. It was a good deal, but it wasn't anywhere near residential rates.
We tried to get a GigE loop from our office to a Tier 1 provider less than a mile away, and we were handed a 5 figure price tag for the install. Just the loop, no data services at all. We were going to stick our own equipment on each end.
Nope, unless you're somewhere weird, you're not going to get those kinds of speeds any time in the near future.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Google?
I have been pretty happy with a debian setup with xen. I have debian as the dom0. Then 2 other virtual debian installs. One as a router with 3 nics and shorewall, squid, and some other stuff, the other as a webserver through a virtual dmz to the router. http://www.shorewall.net/XenMyWay.html Other than that there are distros like smoothwall and ipcop if you want a full distro firewall. I never could get good through put though stuff like the wrt routers which would trash voip convos.
The TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND seems to be a pretty good deal.
802.11n, gigabit ethernet, usb2 port, ath9k-based and pretty cheap. Anything else you'd need?
M or m, little b is bit and big B is byte. 250Mb 1000Mb
You're absolutely right. Several years ago, we were looking at firewall solutions for our GigE pipes. Lots of people had GigE copper inputs, but when we pushed for details it always came down to the simple fact that their hardware couldn't push that kind of traffic.
We looked at building our own PC based boxes to do it. It all came down to the fact that the cards couldn't really push the speeds.
The only solution for GigE that can achieve full line speed is the proper hardware, and you're going to pay a premium for that. You want to route or switch GigE speeds, you're going to put in something like a Cisco Catalyst 6500 series switch (or better). You can pick up a 6500 fairly cheap these days on eBay. Well, cheap in relative terms. It won't be anywhere near the cost of a Linksys AP. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Really ? Can you name me 3 ? And if you got gigE Internet you would be running on home-made wireless devices ? I get 60Mb business Internet on a 100Mb fiber, it costs my company about $4000/month. And how much is the gigE going to cost a month ?
The important piece is that 250Mb/s won't fit on a 100Mb/s pipe, but it will fit on a 1000Mb/s pipe. So, if you don't have gigabit ethernet, you won't get the full bandwidth.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Real 100mbps do require gigabit. If a router is rated for 100mbps, that's its theoretical limit. It won't actually support constant 100mbps.
Not everyone is from the US, you insentivide clod. We have fiber to home up to 1Gbps.
200mbps + 116 HD channels + Phone w/ unlimited calls = 100E/month.
Dilbert RSS feed
...with dd-wrt.
good thruput.
no dual radio, though.
One of my local ISPs in Portugal is offering a home connection of 1gpbs (up and down), plus HD TV for 250E / month. Yes, it's expensive, but it's not a 5 figure, not by a long shot.
Dilbert RSS feed
http://www.lannerinc.com/ ; I've been searching for a new router/server combo for the last few weeks online and have been looking for various SBC devices. I haven't purchased one of their products yet but I'm looking at getting something like http://www.lannerinc.com/Network_Application_Platforms/Network_Processor_Platforms/MR-301 to get going on, with 512MB of RAM and a 1.2 Ghz processor and the ability to add a laptop harddrive and a mini-pci slot for wireless. I expect it to do all the normal things a home server should mail, voip, dns, dhcp, dlna, nfs and torrents. If anyone has a better idea about this let me know but this is about as good as it gets with 5GBE ports so I can use the NFS at full speed internally and as someone said way above this if my 3MBs DSL ever suddenly grows to 500MBps I will totally be prepared
The ASUS RT-N16 is an awesome router that is supported by DD-WRT and has been reported to work with Tomato. The stock firmware is pretty good too. It has some impressive specifications:
You should be able to find one for about $100.
Uh... What about if you want your box to do good 802.11n? That's faster than 100FE. Considering the OP talks of a router to replace his wrt54GL one can safely assume he intends to use wifi devices. And reasonably one can expect ether devices too, possibly on GbE. So sure internet<->router requiring GbE is rare, but device<-GbE ether->router<-wifi->device is hardly uncommon.
Keep your WRT54G, and just upgrade the wireless to 802.11n. I did it with an AirPort Express connected to one of the ethernet ports in bridge mode. In the real world, 802.11n rarely saturates the 100baseT ethernet, so you get almost all the speed, without having to reconfigure everything from scratch. As a bonus, you can still host a separate 802.11b/g network on the old router to support legacy devices without jamming up your N network.
I don't have a specific model to recommend, but pretty much all the most powerful routers today are on the Atheros ar71xx platform. Atheros is much better than Broadcom at supporting open drivers.
https://dev.openwrt.org/wiki/ar71xx
I bought 2 different models of Asus routers that were b/g. They worked great with DD-WRT for almost exactly 2 years, then they died a week apart from each other. Bricks. I replaced them with a WRT54GL. My backup for it is a WRT350N that someone gave me. That's right, the ol' 54GL is more dependable than the fancier 350N.
I'd consider Asus again, but only if I could convince myself to buy 2 so I could have a standby for when the first died.
Just consider this... do you really need the N spectrum? I don't personally do a lot of file transfers between computers on my network where speed is a consideration serious. If I was to saturate the whole allowance of G trying to hit the Internet, that's still more than what my outgoing cable internet service provides with Time Warner.
Moreover, to get full N, you have to broadcast 2.4 and 5 spectrums, and only one of the two goes far enough to get out of a room and through walls, so you effectively have G speeds in most N implementations anyway. Read about it... lots of people turn N off and go back to G, even when they have access to the fancier feature.
Japan, Sweden, Australia (Melbourne), quite a bit of Europe. All places where speeds over 100Mbit are residentially available.
Don't assume that everyone is from the United States.
"Where can you get a gig-e connection at home?"
Sweden, where an old lady has a 40Gbps connection.
You must be new here.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I was looking for a wifi router that I could run Linux on.
In the end, I built a system for about 400USD (parts from newegg) based around Jetway JNC81.
Dual Gigabit ethernet ports, built in wifi (with added card, but AP not supported by driver yet, used an atheros PCI card).
Ubuntu Server with UFW and it works awesome.
I had a WRV54G, which I always hoped would get DD-WRT support. There were some attempts, but it never really got off the ground. The WRV54G had hardware IPSec support in the Broadcom chip it was based on.
I've never located another home wifi router which supported Linux and some form of VPN. IPSec or SSL-VPN would be nice. Anyone know of devices that can do this?
Cablevision's Optimum Ultra is rated at 101mbps. And they recommend a Gig-e router to get close to the rated speed. Docsis 3 standard is good for up to 171/343 mbps depending on the number of allocated channels so it's conceivable that most cable providers will be able to pass the 100 mbps barrier in the near future. So if one buys a router these days, it's a good idea to future proof it and get one that has gig-e ports.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
I have a router with gigabit ports. Know why? Because feeding a 300Mbit wireless link from a 100Mbit wired link is sad.
If you need 802.11n, odds are you want more than 100Mbit/s into it.
And yes, I do watch HD media over the air, so 802.11g with it's nominal 54Mbit is not enough. Granted, most of my media is under 20/30Mbit, but it also needs to read ahead to buffer at startup, and get a consistent throughput of at least the bitrate of the media.
I'm sure your next snark would be to tell me to get separate 802.11n WAP, router, and gig switches. Not all of us want that many devices to maintain, and my WRT300N and three 8 port gig switches is a fine solution.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
I was just considering the same question myself not even 2 days ago. I ultimately decided on the ASUS RT-N16 as others here have suggested, as it seemed to have the consensus of several users on the DD-WRT forum: http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=70817&highlight=rtn16 The WNDR3700 would be nice if they manage to get it past what appears to be an alpha-release support
the Asus WL-520GU and GL models are available for less than $30 and run DD-WRT flawlessly. I picked up multiples for WDS and they have been up 24/7. Performance is awesome, stability is perfect, and cost is less than dinner.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I just bought a WRT320N a couple weeks ago and promptly installed DD-WRT. It has been solid as a rock. Full N speeds on wifi and full gigabit on wired.
Many ISPs outside USA do provide 100Mbit to normal home users.
"100mbit/s down- and upstream can be acquired through either Bahnhof or city networks, these connections are available in almost every major city in Sweden.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cable_Internet_providers#Sweden
on what the price of these will be?
I chose a WRT610N with the large build of DD-WRT.
Dual radios (although configuration can be somewhat limited), powerful 480mhz broadcom processor, good loadout of memory, and uber configurability otherwise. USB support seems good for my USB HDD's.
I thought I had a problem with my wireless reception, but after switching to this setup, I've had 100% uptime over 3 months, minus the ISP dropouts.
And catching my housemates red handed leaving torrent clients running all day eating up our allotted usage after disabling torrents and checking the usage graphs was worth it by itself. /easy //ordering a router designed for dd-wrt online probably isn't a bad idea either ///i hear the asus models are really nice
Netgear hasn't released all of the source, as they should have to comply with the GPL.
Sue the bastards!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
If anyone thinks they will get anywhere near 250mpbs of throughput without a SLA (and the $$$ premium that goes with it), then I would like to offer them some ocean front property I have in Colorado. The link may run at 250mbps, but 100BASE-T will choke the pipe in 3 seconds. The VDSL2 DSLAM will probably be up-linked by a OC4 circuit. It is, after all, the phone company.
DDWRT Supported Devices [dd-wrt.com]
That's what I thought too. Until I bought an Asus RT-N10 and till today, no wireless. It's basically a cheapskate home router, with the words "Open Source" on the packaging.
The Asus RT-N10 is listed in 3 different places as dd-wrt compatible.
Ergo, this router is fully compatible, until you buy one. Then you find out:
Therefore, do not just rely on the dd-wrt list. Cross-check with the OpenWRT list too.
Yeah, but I think the OP is looking for something with multiple copper ports. These just don't meet the needs of a normal home user who wants a few wired, switched ports bridged to a wireless network.
I've been running DD-WRT on a linksys WRT 320N for a while now without issues. I'm just using it as a bridge, so I haven't really stressed it but it has dual band antennas (internal unfortunately) and gig-e ports.
It's also going to be tying your wired and N speed wireless ports.
The netgear WNDR 3700 is running a version of OpenWRT out of the box with a custom interface. OpenWRT has a few builds of their standard distribution which work, with full support being rapidly added. DD-WRT is working hard on adding support for the router as well with at least two test builds being released. Full support should be there within a few months. Again, with it running a customized OpenWRT out of the box, it is only a matter of time for all the router based distributions to have ports which run on it. Add in the fact that it is one of the fastest routers (wan->lan speed, and lan->wan speeds), with some of the best dual band wireless N speeds, a decent amount of RAM, USB ports, gigabit switch/router, and the fastest CPU seen in a consumer class router, you have a very capable device.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
FYI that WRT54GL uses the same binary blobs that all Broadcom based routers are using. If you're going to criticize one company for not being fully OSS with their router firmware, then you need to criticize pretty much ALL of the companies that manufacture routers based on Broadcom chipsets.
There is a HUGE variety of 802.11n routers with different features, it's not like G spec where they were all very similar. Look for something with the features you want, make sure it's supported by the firmware your want (stock firmware always blows!), and look at smallnetbuilder.com for wireless performance comparisons.
Much though it pains me (as a former Ubicom employee) to say it, I would recommend avoiding the earlier DIR-825 rev A which uses a Ubicom processor. Although Ubicom now offers some kind of Linux SDK, as far as I know there is currently no third-party firmware that will run on the DIR-825 rev A. The hardware revision is on the label of the package, and also the rev A and rev B look somewhat different, so if you buy a DIR-825 at retail you can easily ensure that you get the rev B. I suspect that most of the major online retailers probably have exhausted their inventory of rev A by now.
We looked at building our own PC based boxes to do it. It all came down to the fact that the cards couldn't really push the speeds.
Hmmm? I'm doing 10 gigabit line rate on a couple of Dell R710's with nehalems in them. In fact, I can do line rate speed across several interfaces simultaneously. I assure you that you can do gigabit line speed with a reasonably recent off the shelf PC, and an e1000 or similar.
And its either 10, 100, or 1000Mbit ethernet. 250 > 100.
Currenty I had to revert back to a "newer" version of the wrt54g as my v1.0 crapped out. Turned out to be a bad, bloated capacitor so I changed it, but when things like these start to happen I tend not to trust electronics.
The version 8 (or 6?) WRT sometimes decides to freeze. With Linux (dd-wrt) sometimes, with Linksys firmware 1-2 times a DAY.
I also run my Asterisk PBX on an NSLU2. This setup is pretty stable, but just not enough to run Asterisk, and a Perl HA program at the same time (* has 4-5 sip server connections, 4-5 extensions and FXO through VOIP gateways.)
Actually if you do not need wireless, or could live with a USB stick WIFI "card", that might be enough for you.
For my problem, a low power mini-itx might be the solution, fanless and can run a few hours on a UPS (900VA), but still looking for a lower power, more embedded and elegant solution, that does not need 2 days of hacking just to have the WIFI radio up, while wondering why the WRT version is missing libraries run WvDial.
OK, just my quick thoughts about what the hell to replace my WRT with.
Or DS3. After all, some people have AT&T or Qwest.
As somebody who lives in Australia, I have to say you probably have no idea what you're talking about...haha
That, or you bought into Telstra's reality distortion field. That 100Mbps service they're offering in Melbourne, is available to a very small minority only - it's available to about a million people in total, I believe, but most of those won't get anywhere near those speeds.
http://www.misaustralia.com/viewer.aspx?EDP://1268174866621
Also, the demand for it is terrible, probably because of the abysmal pricing. Basically, you have to get it in a cable bundle (with their c*appy tv offering), on a 24 month contract, which costs $169 for 50 Gb per month, or $269 for 100 Gb per month. And that includes both uploads and downloads. So no, I doubt it's really "available" in any sense for the majority of people.
Cheers, Victor
I bought a Netgear WNR3500L to replace my Linksys WRT54GL and half my wireless cards wouldn't talk to it.
At that point I was glad that I had invested in an open router. Simply flashed it with the latest DD-WRT and all my wireless devices were happy.
Until I cascaded a switch off of it (no I didn't create a loop). If there was any activity on the switch, the router would go crazy, dropping ~90% of packets (on the LAN) despite DD-WRT reporting plenty of spare CPU and Memory.
So I waited until a new DD-WRT was released and tried that. The problem actually got worse, not only did it drops packets, the wireless network would actually: drop out, come back, drop out again, then the signal would come back, however it was rendered useless. To recover required a hard reset. This occurred an average of once an hour.
Replaced it with and Airport Extreme today (a little piece of me died) and all my network issues went away.
This product is NOT ready for prime time; hopefully this will change soon.
I can't believe the silly replies to your post.
People get a home router and assume they don't need gigabit or fast wifi because their internet connection is slow.
But the router port speed limits your internal device-to-device communication speed.
Copying large files or doing backups can be severely throttled by not having gig-e ports everywhere (and they're not prohibitively expensive anymore). Hard disks (and SSDs) can easily saturate 100m connections nowadays.
You don't need a 150mbit DSL connection to justify gig-e on your router.
See: their commercial site and their community (read: free!) site
I've been using it for the past few months. I must warn that it's not the most user friendly, but it has a lot of commercial backing. As long as you read the documentation, you'll be fine.
It runs on x86 hardware. I'm running it in a virtual machine running on an Ubuntu box, there's one gigabit NIC in it, but the VM has two virtual NICs. It works incredibly well.
The new version has support for wireless, including N, but I can't vouch for that since I haven't used it. If it's anything like the rest of their stuff, it works flawlessly.
One of my favorite parts about Vyatta is that all its configuration is stored in a single file. If you've put this file on a flash drive, you can boot the livecd and run right off of that if you like. Obviously, if you install extra software or configure things outside of the Vyatta shell, that doesn't go in the config file. Although I don't run off of the livecd, this convenient config file is an easy way to verify the integrity of the system. If you're worried you got hacked, just back up your config and do a clean install. All you have to do is look over the file to make sure everything looks right, and you're good to go.
I'm not fond of Vyatta's commercial aspects, but if you can live with the details listed here then the only thing you have between you and a brilliant setup is the manuals!
I was looking at DD-WRT for a while, but then decided against it because of all the controversy. I honestly don't remember what I didn't like about OpenWRT, but something kept me from trying that too. The big difference between almost everything that's been mentioned so far (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc...) and Vyatta is that while the former are mostly intended for SOHO users, Vyatta is intended as a Cisco competitor for big business. I actually like pouring hours into reading documentation so I can use "enterprise" stuff like Vyatta at home, but it's up to you to decide which way you want to go.
For the record: like many other posters above, I'm not affiliated with Vyatta in any way, I'm just completely startled by the fact that nobody's mentioned it so far. Does Vyatta have a big black mark that nobody's told me about, or is it just not as well known?
By the way: Vyatta sells their own hardware too, but it's pretty pricey. It starts at ~$800 and reaches up over $10K. Personally, I think it's way overpriced, but I suppose there are appropriate situations for such equipment.
It's not that rare in Europe at all.
In Slovenia local ISP, called T-2 is offering Gig FTTH for about two years now, if I'm not mistaken. It's a bit pricey (1000€ per month), but it's there.
Here's price list (in Slovenian, but I think you'll make sense of the prices and speeds).
http://www.t-2.net/?ctxID=000b68&funcID=1
Spiritual successor to the WRT54GL is the WRT160NL with source available form Linksys and full compatibility with OpenWRT
Netgear WNR3500L - hello Gigabit
I'm very happy with my Linksys WRT320N. It's a/b/g/n and has 4 gigabit ethernet ports in addition to the WAN port.
Even though the Linksys firmware worked very well I still prefer to use DD-WRT as it has a lot more functionality. I've been using DD-WRT on it for about 4 months without any issues.
You can also consider the Linksys WRT610N if you want dual radio transmitters.
Total bullshit?
Two examples off the top of my head: Here in Asia there's 1000mbps home broadband in Hong Kong. In Portugal you can also find 1000mbps broadband.
But any connection faster than 100mbps requires gigabit ethernet locally to fully realize it (unless you are running fiber to the desktop). And those are more and more common, at least in Asia and Europe. Maybe you live in Africa or some other broadband backwater, but that doesn't mean everyone does.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH. In a couple of months it will start SHIPPING out with DD-WRT on it. Buffalo and DD-WRT made a deal to make that happen because Buffalo realized their firmware sucks.
I got a gigabit connection at home. So do all my 1650 neighbors that live in this apartment complex.
Download test to a server local to the ISP (it is NOT on my home network): /dev/null http://bolignet.farummidtpunkt.dk/1GB
baldur@pkunk:~$ wget -O
2010-04-25 10:32:37 (111 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [1073741824/1073741824]
Download test to a server in a different country and a different ISP: /dev/null http://speedtest.tele2.net/1GB.zip
baldur@pkunk:~$ wget -O
2010-04-25 10:36:42 (13,8 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [1073741824/1073741824]
Download test to a server in same country but different ISP: /dev/null http://speedtest.it-borger.dk/speedtest/random4000x4000.jpg
baldur@pkunk:~$ wget -O
2010-04-25 10:38:33 (16,8 MB/s) - `/dev/null' saved [31625365/31625365]
My experience is that many gigabit routers can not actually deliver full line speed. The CPU is too weak to perform NAT at those speeds.
Before anyone asks for it, here is traceroute dumps to document the ISP locations:
baldur@pkunk:~$ traceroute bolignet.farummidtpunkt.dk
traceroute to bolignet.farummidtpunkt.dk (79.98.195.61), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 79.98.193.129.customers.telelet.dk (79.98.193.129) 4.188 ms 4.148 ms 4.138 ms
2 79.98.195.61.customers.telelet.dk (79.98.195.61) 0.181 ms 0.171 ms 0.160 ms
baldur@pkunk:~$ traceroute speedtest.tele2.net
traceroute to speedtest.tele2.net (90.130.66.198), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 79.98.193.129.customers.telelet.dk (79.98.193.129) 4.555 ms 4.517 ms 4.508 ms
2 79.98.199.153.customers.telelet.dk (79.98.199.153) 0.744 ms 0.714 ms 0.733 ms
3 79.98.199.149.customers.telelet.dk (79.98.199.149) 5.577 ms 5.623 ms 5.595 ms
4 ge-2-3.bgp1.ip.telelet.net (77.75.166.237) 2.259 ms 2.230 ms 2.201 ms
5 gi9-8.ccr01.cph01.atlas.cogentco.com (149.6.136.57) 2.172 ms 2.176 ms 2.234 ms
6 te1-1.ccr01.mmx01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.0.50) 3.761 ms 3.294 ms 3.261 ms
7 te1-1.ccr01.sto01.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.3.10) 11.951 ms 12.268 ms 12.235 ms
8 avk-core-2.gigabiteth3-18.swip.net (130.244.200.165) 12.430 ms 12.533 ms 12.587 ms
9 kst-core-1.tengigabiteth5-0-0.swip.net (130.244.39.9) 12.266 ms 12.219 ms 12.189 ms
10 kst-ncore-1.tengigabiteth2-1.swip.net (130.244.52.106) 12.803 ms 12.565 ms 12.373 ms
11 kst-ncore-2.tengigabiteth2-2.swip.net (130.244.52.110) 12.254 ms 12.452 ms 12.427 ms
12 kst-spe-2.tengigabiteth3-4.swip.net (130.244.206.134) 12.964 ms 12.935 ms 12.907 ms
13 warp9.tele2.net (90.130.66.198) 12.856 ms 12.828 ms 12.803 ms
baldur@pkunk:~$ traceroute speedtest.it-borger.dk
traceroute to speedtest.it-borger.dk (130.226.157.50), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 79.98.193.129.customers.telelet.dk (79.98.193.129) 4.334 ms 4.289 ms 4.281 ms
2 79.98.199.153.customers.telelet.dk (79.98.199.153) 0.974 ms 0.956 ms 0.928 ms
3 79.98.199.149.customers.telelet.dk (79.98.199.149) 5.765 ms 5.764 ms 5.749 ms
4 ge-2-3.bgp1.ip.telelet.net (77.75.166.237) 1.759 ms 1.798 ms 2.026 ms
5 194.19.218.157 (194.19.218.157) 10.441 ms 10.541 ms 12.759 ms
6 194.255.42.249 (194.255.42.249) 3.467 ms 2.976 ms 3.117 ms
7 194.255.186.126 (194.255.186.126) 2.870 ms 2.957 ms 2.891 ms
8 130.226.157.50 (130.226.157.50) 2.718 ms 2.838 ms 2.726 ms
We pay ca. USD 5000 per month for 500/500 Mbps internet. This includes both cost for the circuit (fiber) and unlimited internet service.
It is possible to do even cheaper. Cogent claims to sell internet at USD 1 per megabit if you are buying at least 10 gigabits. Cost for establishing a circuit comes on top of that however.
Dedicated point to point fibers are not that expensive, at least not in this area.
Have a look at Billion http://www.billion.com/ They may not be Open Source like DD-WRT etc, however for around the same cost as your Belkin, Netgear, Buffalo etc - they totally kick ass, and generally give you a much more feature rich feature set. Some models are 802.11n + gigabit ports + DSL or FTTH + USB for 3G backup path if DSL or FTTH goes down. They have voice integrated models too for VoIP + VPN as well so they are certainly worth looking at.
In Singapore we already have 100 mbps down / 10 mbps up speeds for residential homes for the pass few years (cable).
Actually I am having such a connection at my home.
Rumour says they are going to double the speeds in the next year or so.
This is just about typical for slashdot these days someone asks a perfectly good valid question and it just turns into a shit slinging comp with brags and counter brags but more importantly ZERO usefull information
This site has gone from dire to decaying to festering away
What the F*** is Kharma i do got teeth i don't got no kharma
I'd concur. I am routing, firewalling and NATing (IPv4/6 dual stack) at 100 mbit on a measly P4 2.4 gHz using a Broadcom built-in and the cheapest realtek available. I see about 40% CPU usage, the major part of which is interrupts. I have an e1000 but it's PCI, so I don't get gbit off of it.
Depends on the packet size, some of these cards will handle wire rate when transferring large packets, but if you flood them with small packets they fall over pretty quickly. Some nics are better than others and obviously a faster bus helps somewhat too.
Incidentally, i used to do 100mbit natting on a 233mhz p2 a few years ago, the fact you see 40% cpu usage on a p4 is down to your horrendous choice of nics. My p233 could handle 100mbit of normal traffic, but would keel over at about 19mbit of small packets if i remember.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I'm also from Portugal.
Although you are technically correct, if you are referring to ZON's service, I should say that I highly doubt they'll deliver the 1Gbps they claim (given all my previous experiences with this ISP).
Also, given the arbitrary download limits they have, I'm not so sure a 1Gbps pipe from ZON is a good idea (i.e. in the contractual fine print, they say you have unlimited data transfers up to "reasonable levels of consumption" but NOWHERE does it specify an actual objective limit; if you do transfer data above what they consider "reasonable", they _will_ phone you and attempt to harass you, as I've seen being done before, NEVER actually telling you what the "reasonability threshold" really is).
Caveat emptor.
I hope that the ISP you mention has a multi-terabit connection to the rest of the world otherwise their contention ratio won't be good enough to deliver gigabit speeds to the home (except for locally delivered content - backbone network permitting).
100 Gb per month for a 100 Mbps pipe? That sounds wonderful.
Enjoy your 1024 seconds of torrenting per month ;)
Yup, Telstra pricing hurts.
Sure, NextG is fantastic, but not to justify what they're charging.
Can't wait for them to be split by the government into wholesale & retail.
So, like me, you want the stackable blue and black case?
I'm trying to figure out how to stuff a 4 port KVM into one of those boxes.
Anybody know the cheapest thing available with that case style? (Wish Linksys sold blank boxes)
Anyone remember the story from a few years ago of the guy who hacked his 54 to install a PC100-type DIMM? I've never been able to find it again.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I'm a little bit surprised that MikroTik Routerboards haven't been mentioned yet. You can run OpenWRT on those if you prefer. I'm not all that impressed with them as access points though, at least not with Windows clients when using WPA. The Linux laptop and the Wii and various other devices work fine with it. It could be a RouterOS bug though, so maybe it'll work better with OpenWRT.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I got a nice speed boost on my even older WRT54G just by upgrading from HyperWRT to Tomato. It now let me max out my 25Mbps FiOS link, whereas it was stuck at 15-20Mbps before.
I haven't heard anything all that great about 802.11n yet as far as range and performance goes. Don't mind using wires for performance-critical stuff either. Maybe someday...
This is lamapper posting as Anonymous as ./ will not let me log on correctly and post...FYI
Currently the only places were consumers can get 100Mbps/100Mbps in the USA are Wilson N.C and 25+ cities in Utah via Greenlight and Utopia respectively.
Thanks to Google's new FTTH initiative 5 more communities will be getting honest high speed bandwidth, but not just 100Mbps/100Mbps, but even more 1Gbps/1Gbps.
Its no surprise that Google is seeking 5 communities where the politicians have not been bought and paid for by the cable/telco lobbyists. The elected officials of Wilson N.C., invited them to provide high speed bandwidth to their citizens only to have the monopolies/duopoly Internet providers refuse. When Greenlight agreed to provide fiber to homes and 100Mbps/100Mbps service at FIOS prices, the telcos/cable companies finally responded. They started lobbying the North Carolina state legislature to prevent Greenlight or any other company from providing decent service to other citizens of North Carolina. The Cable/Telco lobbyist submitted legislation in 2009 and will continue through 2010, only time will tell if the citizens of North Carolina are stupid enough to let them.
Considering that the Japanese had 100Mbps/100Mbps back in 2000 at $55 per month and thanks to Fiber gave those same customers 1Gbps/1Gbps for $52 per month. Yes the markets are actually working in Japan.
Here in the USA thanks to corporations and lobbyists buying our elected officials, no economic markets are honestly working any more.
In 2007, the USA was 23 on a list for high speed Internet or broadband. So there are plenty of countries that have had better access then the USA.
The ONLY way you can be sure that you are receiving the bandwidth you are paying for is to run DD-WRT, OpenWRT or Tomato on a supported firewall/router.
100% of the Cable companies throttle their Internet bandwidth to as little as 384Kbps/101Kbps as shown via the real time bandwidth monitor in one of the above three firmware packages. Sure the speed test might show 25Mbps/2Mbps but as soon as that speed test finishes, your provider is throttling, limiting, restricting your bandwidth to something much less.
I am still waiting to get a report from a FIOS (50Mbps/5MBps for $119 per month) customer running either DD-WRT, OpenWRT or Tomato firmware on a supported firewall/router so that we can see what the actual consistent bandwidth is for that service in real time...not opinions or false marketing claims.
Sadly transferring files back and fort and doing the math does not tell you want your sustained versus throttled service is.
You must have real time bandwidth monitoring software. You must have either DD-WRT, OpenWRT or Tomato.
So far I am unaware of a reasonably priced proprietary software that gives you your real time consistent bandwidth.
Its sad that multiple posts whether FUD or simply uninformed have posted that no one is getting 100Mbps/100Mbps much less 1Gbps/1Gbps Internet bandwidth. This simply is not true even here in the United States. And when someone posts that they do indeed get this level of bandwidth, others come out of the woodwork and attempt to debunk them.
Its kind of difficult to debunk the truth.
Thank everyone for posting their firewall/router solutions that will run either DD-WRT, OpenWRT or Tomato as I am planning to upgrade my current WRT54G DD-WRT enabled routers (have 3 and a WRT150N as well) and have successfully installed the DD-WRT firmware on them by simply following the directions on the website line by line. Even if I did accidentally "brick" the router, there are instructions on how to "un brick" them and since I actually reinstalled the old firmware just to verify that it was a possibility, I know they work as well.
So do not fear trying, just follow the instructions, you will be fine.
Thanks also to the posters that suggested comparing comments on both the OpenWRT and DD-WRT websites and wikis as I too want to ma
I have a N router from TP LINK and it is based on Linux.
http://www.tp-link.com/products/productDetails.asp?pmodel=TL-WR841ND
It is easy to update and works quite well for a $44 router...
Cheers.
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato
Made my WRT54G v4 perform well enough (compared to stock / HyperWRT) that I didn't need a new router to keep up with my 25Mbps FiOS uplink
I've replaced my wrt54gl with a wrt320n. It's cheap and has gigabit lan, dual band n wireless (only one band at a time).
DD-WRT v24-sp2 (01/02/10) big - build 13575M NEWD-2 K2.6 Eko
with a bunch of custom made scripts for openvpn and pppoe bridging.
If you have a bigger budget and you want tow band at a time you can buy a wrt610n...
Bye!
It's been a while since I've read up on this stuff, but isn't there a bunch of overhead to take into account? I don't think it's actually possible to get even close 100Mb/s on a 100Mb ethernet line.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
I'm very happy with my Linksys WRT 160NL. USB port, 802.11n, dd-wrt running rock solid.
I think it is one of the few routers who actually have it's sources online as well
In Latvia we have around 10% of connections that now are 500 Mbit fiber optic link to your place, so you basically get a gigabit ethernet socket for either your computer or a router, so there is a big demand for wireless routers with all gigabit ethernet ports, n-wireless and that can actually handle the full 500 Mbit of traffic trough it. And I wish to run DD-WRT on it.
DAD!! I found you at last.... when can I move my compuH^H^H^ self back home?
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
"it's a good idea to make an informed assumption and get one that has gig-e ports."
fixed that for you. there is no such thing as future proof.
nice models like the TL-WR1043ND:
4x GBit ethernet, Atheros 9k a/b/g/n wireless, 32MB ram, 8MB flash for as little as 40,- EUR.
What do you gain by keeping the ADSL connection itself inside the router?
Lower latency and lower power consumption.
Any ISP connection over 100Mb/s is going to need a gigabit connection.
Coincidentally, I spoke with a Verizon rep yesterday. When I told him I wouldn't use FiOS because I get faster throughput with Cable's second tier price plan, he told me that Verizon was about to launch 100Mb speed to consumers.
I buy several Gb/s from Cogent at three POPs in the US and two in Europe. You can indeed get it for $1USD/Mb (or cheaper, depending on your rep).
Well it makes it a lot easier for law enforcement to listen in on your local traffic. It you had your own device that talked to the provider's device you could do a better job of keeping your local traffic invisible to the provider.
US$26/month if you're in Hong Kong. Hongkies need routers too, you know.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I have fibre to my house connected to the 2 Gbit ring that my local government owns (i.e. I am a co-owner of this). I subscribe to a 100 mpbs service on my fibre and when I connect a laptop directly to the fibre hub I get over 85-90 mbps download speed. I am not sure why I didn't get full upload speed during these tests, but it doesn't bother me too much.
Now I am connected through a Buffalo Technology WHR-HP-G54 WIFI router, running Tomato Firmware so the actual throughput in the Buffalo is never more than about 40 mbps. But even when my s/w development team is here in the house, all 12 of them, nobody ever complains over bandwidth. (But we don't run torrrents all of us normally.)
Here is a link to an online test result: http://www.speedtest.net/result/264255518.png
I live in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. Our local government has built the local fibre infrastructure and I can subscribe to 100 mbps IP services from four different ISPs for about US$33/month.
Akvo.org - the open source for water and sanitation
In my experience they only affordable have those types of connect speeds if you are planing to collocate one of the big Telco's local POPs. Generally here in the States for commercial applications anything over 10M can be delivered to you as an Ethernet handoff. Usually that is getting out to the site as some number of bonded DS3 or DS12 circuits. There are therefore some economic considerations. If the speed you want happens to be something that results from a smallish multiple of DS3s or DS1s say 1-3 its usually cheaper to terminate them yourself. If you want something odd like 10M then they are going to want to bring it into your site as 7DS1 loops or something obscene like that; in which case the equipment you'd need to aggregated all those serial loops starts to get really expensive compared to the very low lease fee on whatever strange device the telco has which will turn it into Ethernet for you.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Oh, don't worry. We're far behind in many other aspects. In fact, I think internet access prices is one of the very few examples where we're better than average Western countries.
http://www.theage.com.au/business/world-business/fitch-cuts-portugals-credit-rating-as-debt-crisis-heightens-20100325-qx3e.html
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Make sure you get the right supervisor module with that it its not going route any 1Gbps either.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Well, I heard they had improved in the last year, when the switch to fiber optics had begun.
I'm a Cabovisão user, and since I'm a poor bastard I only have 10mpbs. But they're real - sometimes speedtest.net reaches 12mbps :)
Dilbert RSS feed
I'm not running this but a friend is. He claims it CAN support WiFi and that it has served him well on Via X86 hardware. http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html From his description it's pretty good at blocking and handling traffic like a good firewall\IDS. Add in wireless and it just MIGHT serve the need. However he's not yet gotten wireless hardware on his to test so no personal experiences with that portion yet. He's running it on this -> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856107055 but has no room for a PCI card and has been trying USB dongles with no success so far.
Something like that is what I'm most interested in. Yeah, it's another box to admin but it's powerful, has no issues with "flashing", no need for hardware hacking, and the features are limited only by hardware support, CPU, memory, and people's willingness to add them. As it stands now I do a little admin on my current router anyway and if an x86 box could be administered as easily I'd jump on it even if it does cost more than an Asus, Buffalo, Netgear, or Linksys device...
Thoughts? What would be good hardware for this? So far the problem has been finding a good hardware base - two GigE NIC, a good CPU, some room for expansion, and LOW power....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
I think there was one provider overseas who stated that they intended to offer 100Mb/s to the customer.
There are several providers here in Sweden that offer 100 Mbit/s connections. I have such a connection, for which I pay some $20/month. When using the broadband test service operated by the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency, I routinely get around 90 Mbit/s in both directions. I've gotten around 40-50 Mbit/s when downloading stuff from US web servers, so the capacity is clearly not just within the operator network.
Good Grief.............he/she made a slight mistake but does that make them insensitive? He was talking US perspective so if it doesn't apply to you then guess what..........it doesn't apply. Your snappiness makes you qualified for the "Insensitive Clod" title for this moment.
Because feeding a 300Mbit wireless link from a 100Mbit wired link is sad.
Except it's usually pretty hard to get all those Mbit/s that wireless links claim to be capable of. 54 Mbit/s WLAN connections rarely manage to push more than 15 Mbit/s. 11 Mbit/s WLAN rarely manage to push more than 5 Mbit/s. I'd be pretty surprised if those WLAN connections that are supposedly capable of 300 Mbit/s can actually push more than 100-150 Mbit/s.
Wired ethernet is a completely different story. 100 Mbit/s ethernet can actually push 100 Mbit/s, 1 Gbit/s ethernet can actually push 1 Gbit/s, etc.
I'm a little behind on the way they're doing it, but the way it was just a few years ago was this....
If you were in the datacenter, they gave you eithernet, either attached to a FastEthernet port of a GigE interface. Some of them were gearing up for 10GigE interfaces, but when I was purchasing we were still limited to buying multiple GigE interfaces.
Bringing connectivity out of a datacenter, we'd buy T1/DS1 circuits for 1.544Mb/s or less. For 3Mb/s you'd buy two T1's and bind them. Above that you'd buy a T3/DS3 and they'd provision it for the fraction. For example, a place I worked years ago had a 4Mb/s circuit, which was a fractional T3.
I don't know that anyone provides 100Mb/s over fiber as a commercial line. They'd usually do like an OC3. More recently I know they've done GigE fiber with 1000baseLX/LH for up to 10Km, and 1000baseZX for up to 70km. I'd never heard of anyone getting a GigE loop over about 15 miles (about 25km).
It was definitely cheaper to keep our servers in the datacenters, and avoided all kinds of pesky problems like local loops, maintaining reliable power at our site, etc, etc. We'd maintain minimal servers at our locations, and let the datacenters do the real work.
Well, now that "we" and "our" stuff is irrelevant, since I'm not working. Now it's all "they", and the "I" part of it does little things for friends from home.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Ya, I left out planning of components. :)
For those that don't know, the big Cisco Catalysts need at least one "Supervisor" card to run things. Two is preferred so it will have a hot spare. Then you have to add in cards for the interfaces that you want. You can get line cards to do just about anything you want. If you want GigE to each port, you have to (obviously) get GigE line cards, and a supervisor that can support it and the expected pps rates.
The biggest one I set up was a 13 slot Catalyst 5000, with 360 Ethernet ports (about 180 100baseTX, and 180 10baseTX for a specific application), and two supervisors. If the machines could saturate the port, it wouldn't hurt anything except the other port that it was sending to/from. That was a large office configuration with the switch being in their internal use server room. I would have some fun flooding one desktop from several others (20Mb/s from 6 machines would do it). I never managed to make any significant load on that switch, which was a definite improvement from the chaos of small consumer grade switches that it replaced.
I will say it takes a good bit of planning so you don't get confused on what is attached to each port. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
While you make a valid point, I think 100mbps+ connections are becoming common enough (in some parts of the world) for this to be something to consider. A fairly big cable ISP (Ziggo) in the Netherlands will start offering 120mbps sometime this year and I had to actually look pretty hard for a router that could handle such speeds. I ended up buying a Dlink DIR-655 which according to some router benchmark article that I forgot the link of should be able to handle it, I hope..
Really? When we were testing our new link to the NREN, where we have a 10GBE backhaul that terminates in a 24 GigE ports, we put a Linux box (ordinary HP desktop machine) on a GigE port. We got download speeds of like 700Mbps+. I was pretty suprised, but it seems to me that an ordinary desktop PC can do gigabit speeds.
Why futureproof? Won't it be cheaper to buy the fifty dollar router now, and the gigabit one in two years when the price has come down?
Can you construct some sort of rudimentary lathe?
The cards can't push the speeds? This seems silly, since the Cisco 6500 series (mostly) uses Pentium III processors and PCI cards. There are several open source router solutions that use standard hardware. Check vyatta for one example. Maybe you chose poorly performing components, or possibly the router was ineffectively configured, but the GigE cards most likely can push GigE speeds.
The Vyatta open source system works very well, and it has a very good community. These two things are required imho for success in open source. They have appliances or you can byobox, including any of the very small, nearly hand held low power server solutions now out there.
Depends on your setup. As I type, I'm running 20-25Mbit/s over my WLAN on average. Peak so far was 28Mbit/s for a brief period.
There's cheap junk, there's nice 54g, then there's cheap 802.11n, and at the top is the good stuff. If it's not 3X3, it's not really 802.11n!
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
I sure hope they did (for their client's sake).
Kudos to you for choosing an ISP not associated with PT/Portugal Telecom. I'm not sure if you did that consciously, but let me tell you, if you don't already know, that the biggest problem with the communications market in Portugal, and I'm sure in many other countries, is the fact that the former state-owned communications company (in this case, Portugal Telecom) have a de facto monopoly (since they own most, if not all, of the copper infrastructure over which DSL works). Although it's true that most people in urban centers (sometimes) have several options, most of the rest of the country is stuck with Portugal Telecom (or its proxies: Sapo, ZON/PT Multimédia/TVcabo and MEO). The fact that their competitors also have to pay to use the copper infrastructure means that they can control the price baseline because they control most of the supply of bandwidth.
Cabovisão actually seems one of the less-evil ISPs in Portugal (well.. I haven't actually been a costumer of theirs, but they just smell more minty fresh than the other stale Portugal Telecom spawns). Just sayin'...
Argh. That was supposed to be 200-250Mbit and 280Mbit. I converted to MB/s and back, and didn't finish correctly.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
I don't think I've heard of a consumer connection that does over 100mbps let alone 1000mbps.
My appartement building has fiber to the basement from Telia and we can all go ahead and have a consumer 100mbps connection. Now, it must be mentioned that I only get full 100mbps downstream when downloading linux distro packages from a local univerisity mirror, you can forget downloading anywhere near max speed from overseas, but still, 100mbps really is nothing strange here in Sweden anymore. If you live in or close to a city then that's a very real option now.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Exactly. That is why I pointed out in a reply above to GP that people should take that "1 Gbps pipe zomgzorz!" claim from ZON Multimédia with a grain of salt: ZON (formerly known as TVCabo) is quite known for not delivering what they advertise (let's just say they are the Comcast of Portugal: known to be pioneers in DPI-based traffic shaping and anti-P2P measures). GP said they have become a bit better recently but, as the parent correctly pointed out, they seem to be once again advertising things they can't possibly guarantee (they WON'T be able to hand out so many 1 Gbps pipes if people actually USE them in full). Once again I say: caveat emptor.
tl;dr: READ THE FINE PRINT GODDAMIT!
How about flashing OpenWrt/dd-wrt on the Fon Fonera (http://www.fon.com)? I have an Asus WL-500G v1 running OpenWrt and an Asus WL-500W still running stock firmware (but purchased with the intent to install OpenWrt, if necessary), but the Fonera seems quite interesting too.
Well, 700Mb/s wouldn't have done it, since we would have sometimes reached over 900Mb/s if we had other datacenter failures. We ran out of at least 3 at the time, and our networks were segmented within those for each GigE line, but still it could happen. We planned growth for when we reached 80% of a line under normal conditions, leaving room for disaster situations which would increase our utilization beyond normal.
I wish I was still there, so I could play with it more with modern hardware and find its limitations. It's just not the same doing it at home with generated traffic. Real world traffic is always different. Even in our test rigs, we could come close to real world situations, but throwing it up into the real world showed all the weird stuff that could happen.
When you tested your traffic, were you just doing large files, or small ones? You'll find many small connections are a lot harder to manage than a few large ones. Downloading a few dozen ISO's is nothing compared to thousands of people grabbing web pages and images smaller than 100k.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Now, it must be mentioned that I only get full 100mbps downstream when downloading linux distro packages from a local univerisity mirror
There's the rub. Most of us don't live near Universities or any other site with a monster upstream pipe.
So, even if I did have a 100mbps connection, it would not effectively matter.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
PCIe 1.0, released in 2004, could only push 250Mb/s.
PCIe 2.0 x1 lanes, released in 2007, could push 500Mb/s per lane. The x16 lanes were reserved for graphics. The spec does have provisions for a x32 lane which can handle 16Gb/s aggregate.
PCIe 3.0 was announced in 2007, but the final spec isn't due until second quarter of 2010 (like, real soon). It should double the PCIe 2.0 spec.
These were specification release dates, not when the actual hardware was available. I stopped working there in 2006, so the maximum throughput we could have hoped to accomplish was 250Mb/s.
Looking at CDW's site for PCIe cards, the affordable ones are x1. They have more expensive ones. The cheapest is a $200 x4 card with two ports. I don't know if that's 2 lanes per port, or if they're aggregated and then divided. That should happily accomplish 1Gb/s per port. The question then becomes, do you have any other bottlenecks that would hinder your performance.
Most likely, if your machine says "GigE", the most you can push through is 250Mb/s. Check your specs and you'll have a better idea. Just because it says "GigE" doesn't mean it can do "GigE". It will at very least exceed the ability of a 100baseTX card.
I don't recall any Cisco products using Intel x86 processors, except for the original Cisco PIX ("classic") in the 4u chassis. We had a Cisco PIX 10000, which had a Pentium Pro in it, and barfed when we upgraded our fractional T3 to full line speed. It got replaced with an x86 box running Slackware, which took it like a champ. :) It didn't fail because of the throughput speed, it failed because of the PPS rate we needed to accomplish.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The best router to replace the WRT54GL is the Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH
Its a cheap router with incredible specs: Atheros Chipset + Wifi, 400 MHz CPU, 32 MB flash, 64 MB dram, gigabit-switch, usb2-port.. ;-)
Sametime its supported by DD-WRT - some of the routers are even sold with dd-wrt-firmware from the factory.
Everyone into Open Source-routers, know that Buffalo WHR-G54 as G-router took over the WRT54G/GL. Because of the stability on long distance links (above 16 km) - Atheros WiFi-cards are giving alot less noise than Broadcom-WiFi-cards.
I know which wireless-router I would pick
Open WRT has the potential to be fantastic, and used to be a stable release that worked on many platforms, the WRTGL in particular. That focus is lost, and instead it is to make it run on everything with a CPU.
I had used the old "White Russian" version for a long time on the standard WRT54GL (thats where the name OpenWRT comes from), and decided to upgrade, and I could not get it to even work on the reference platform as a basic AP.
I am no networking expert, but I have written a few network stacks, including wireless ones, so I am not completely green. The solution to get it to work came down to set up the whole development environment, and do it myself. Maybe that is the intention, but I just do not have the time to do this. I reverted back to the old "White Russian".
On another box the implementation booted, but lacked so much, that I reverted back to the factory image.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I agree.
After spending time in Australia, I miss my US broadband.
You don't realize how good you got it until it's gone. Sure we get slower than advertised rates, but its not that much slower and despite claims here on Slashdot it's practically unlimited for the average consumer.
In Australia they seem to sell it by capacity rather than speed. In Alice Springs, I can buy a 3GB capped account for around the same price that I spend at home (for the "unlimited" connection).
After talking amongst my friends here who come from different parts the globe, I come to the opinion that there always some undisclosed "gotchas" when someone talks about how great their service is, either:
1. The service has unlimited connections which really means no data surcharges, but the service is throttled whenever a few subscribers use more bandwidth than budgeted for the neighborhood.
2. The service has great connection speeds (in theory), and have insanely low data limits where the ISP makes their money from the overages. Plus you may have the added benefit of #3 below.
3. The connection is great with the latest technology at each subscribers home so your government can brag about how advance you are, but in reality when you decide to venture beyond your small community and try to talk to the rest of the planet, you have a horrible backbone and limited connectivity that must be shared among all of those subscribers. So unless you chatting with your neighbor, your getting horrible data rates with huge ping times.
. To paraphrase:
There are lies, damn lies, and broadband brochures.
Of course, who has time to be online when there are other things to do!
Cheers, Bill
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Sorry for the confusion, the datasheet (copy) I was looking at has the 6500 on the front but specs for pix on the back. I missed that
Regarding the throughput of various busses,
PCI-X. 1064MB/s
came out in 1998, so it has been possible to build a gigabit capable router since sometime around 1999 using pc hardware.
For completely configurable hardware it's okay, but most integrated gateway devices only let you have a DSL WAN port, and rarely do they support any bridging mode. As soon as you want to change something in your network, your hardware becomes useless.
What do you gain by keeping the ADSL connection itself inside the router?
Because the ADSL bridge they include is a piece of shit that reboots itself 10 times a day? I don't know about anyone else, but that works for me, and rather than having so many devices, the more I can roll together without additional hardware cost will also save me cost and complexity.
Learn to love Alaska
You realize you're talking about a gateway and not necessarily routing, right? If you want to route between switched gigabit subnets, you'll need a gigabit-capable router.
Vyatta is getting better regarding the whole routing thing. Too bad their wireless support is still poor, and uPnP isn't available. If they fix that up a bit, and you can find appropriate GigE hardware, you should be set.
You realize it's a gateway router with a switch in it, right? For, like, inside the home. Where, with OpenWRT, you might like things like, say, stats? There are 8 (?) port GB switches out there, yes, some are even smart - but good luck getting anything reasonably priced that has the feature / functionality set of OpenWRT - be it as a firewall, proxy, or network monitoring / audit device.
{drool}
Where, if I might ask?
Worth moving for? (-:
The way I see it, there's mostly just two choices. The cheap option is to throw DD-WRT or Tomato on a $30 801.22n router. The expensive option is to use a real PC.
I had been using an old Pentium 166mhz, running Debian (yuck), for over ten years. I recently retired it and replaced it with an Atom-based mini PC. Figure $150 to $200 for an Atom PC, if you build it yourself. If you want something with a web interface, pfSense or SmoothWall are quite decent.
The PC option is much costlier, but you do get a lot of flexibility. If 802.11n is made obsolete tomorrow by some other bullshit spec, you can simply replace the WiFi card (or USB dongle). If you want to do funky routing or load-balancing, you can add more NICs. Your router can double as a file server, or a home automation hub, or even an HDTV media player with XBMC if your hardware can handle it.
The big downside to a PC-based router is the power consumption. It's not too bad with an Atom (~25w), but a full ATX system will draw at least 50-60 watts, while a Linksys/Netgear probably draws less than 10 watts. Either way, The cost of electricity will far exceed the hardware investment after 2 or 3 years.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Sadly, not only is Gbps and 802.11n an issue, but frequently so is the lack of 802.11n at 5GHz. Why play at 2.4GHz when everyone has been trying to get out of that spectrum, e.g. cordless phones, to avoid interference. {sigh}
1000€ is more than a bit pricey!
But I'd kill for 25€ 100/10. Is that just in major centres or what?
I want to be on the sea and have 100/10 ideally. ;-)
Sent from my PDP-11
A lot of people don't know this, but the router speed is very different from the switch speed, and is never advertised. In fact, the only place I have ever seen it actually determined is in user tests.
While most routers have 100 mbps switches, and some even have 1000 mbps switches, the router is bottle necked to 20-40 mbps. The dinky little ARM processor running the routing software just can't handle more throughput than that. In order to achieve 100+ mpbs routing speed you are starting to look at Intel Atom class processors or above, which is only available in industrial or DIY network equipment. I worked for a company a few years ago that made industrial networking equipment, and the firewall/router boxes they used had dual dual-core processors (the fastest available at the time) to sustain ~500 mbps of routed traffic and client authentication.
The ASUS RT-N16, Linksys WRT610N, and Netgear WNR3500L look promising. They're all supported by dd-wrt and in theory could work with openwrt. The Asus is some nice hardware for $90.
Openwrt is the router part of dd-wrt. Here's an explanation of dd-wrt's architecture on the wrt54g router that I wrote up for the dd-wrt wiki.
I wonder if any of these can take new firmware:
http://www.speedguide.net/broadband-list.php?cat=50
Take a look at this device: TP-Link TL-WR1043ND (http://www.tp-link.com/products/productDetails.asp?pmodel=TL-WR1043ND)
- Cheap (~50 EUR)
- Full supported by openwrt (http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr1043nd)
- 802.11n with three antennas
- GBit Switch
- 32 MiB RAM
- 400Mhz CPU
- USB 2.0
"Worth moving for?"
No, not really.
Dilbert RSS feed
You could buy the Fonera 2.0n (15% reduction at the moment with voucher "C010128493375896")
It runs the latest openwrt with the luci gui and offers the possibility to create your own lua/luci/openwrt-package plugins and offer it for 3rd party inclusion;
it also has examples of FMG, using an image that contains your openwrt package/lua/luci which is too big for internal memory to run of a usb stick...
it has a usb port and it comes with an usb hub to have more than 1 device connected at the same time...
Allready built-in support for 3G, printer, music, disk storage (fat,ext, ntfs, hfs filesystems), samba/ftp/web, flickr/picasa/youtube/facebook uploading, megadownload/rapidsearch/torrent downloading, firefox plugin, webcam support...
and all sourcecode can be found on www.fonosfera.org... you can compile it yourself (i did many times)...read all code (only the ralink wifi driver is binary); but you can tweak the wifi startup script ...
Allready has support for the wifi-n country tag... which is a bummer for many mac devices otherwise...
more info on wiki.fon.com
Just bought this one :
http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr1043nd
A standard ethernet frame 18 bytes of headers etc plus a bit of preamble (according to one website I just looked at this is 8 bytes but I think it varies with the type of ethernet being considered). TCP/IP is another 40 bytes (or a little more if there are special options) so the overhead is going to be arround 68 bytes per packet.
For a full sized packet (1500 bytes including the IP headers but excluding the ethernet headers) that's arround 5% overhead. For small packets it's much higher.
If the line is half duplex there is further overheads from the access control stuff and from sending the acks.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
It's not just a CPU/speed issue, even high powered Cisco routers will have Gig-E speeds clobbered if the MTU isn't tweaked to support "Jumbo" frames (9000 vs legacy 1500) The best speed tests on a "Gig-E" link with an MTU of 1500 at best will deliver around 650Mbps to 750Mbps of throughput. Many networks haven't been reconfigured to allow for Jumbo sized frames, hell most computers don't enable it either (usually something in your network card settings must be manually enabled to allow them as they are disabled by default). You also have to factor in TCP window sizing too, sending large packets through is more efficient than sending smaller packets (less router CPU overhead). What is your bandwidth test using as your yardstick? All of this will affect your testing.
Heres a nickle kid.. get yourself a real router.
Sorry.. I mean.. if you are getting real 100mbps on a home connection, and it's important to get the full thing, then perhaps one should look into getting some real network h/w that can handle 100mbps at line-rate.
I'd suggest you can pick up some used older Cisco kit for fairly inexpensive, but most of that stuff can't do IPv6 in H/W, although for home that might be ok in running in s/w. I'd probably say spring the cost of your TV and buy a Cisco1800 or something similar.
Alternatively you could build your own *nix based router, but you should invest in getting real network cards for it since that is where most computers fail.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
I'm rather happy with a Linksys WRT320N.
It has a gigabit switch and easily does 100mbit wireless. (It claims 300mbit but I'm more than happy with the 100mbit that I get from my setup).
It's not the fastest hardware around but it's supports every DD-WRT feature with room to spare at an excellent price.
How about a Guru plug (a sheeva plug with wireless)?
http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-32-guruplug-server-plus.aspx
Here in the UK it seems you used to get a USB modem (designed for windows, can be used from linux but not particulally reliably) and now you get a router. Occasionally these routers can be configured to bridge the public IP onto ethernet but usually they can't.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
One of my local ISPs in Portugal is offering a home connection of 1gpbs (up and down), plus HD TV for 250E / month. Yes, it's expensive, but it's not a 5 figure, not by a long shot.
The service can be found here (in Portuguese). It's 250€ pm minus the 10c I took to comment on this.
My 10 cents,
The Annoying Anonymous Sakila Dolphin
I had a quick look at the Verizon FiOS site. 50Mb/20Mb was the fastest residential line they offer. For business customers, they offer a 35Mb/35Mb account if (for those serving or uploading), or the 50Mb/20Mb which would be more targeted towards offices who are downloading more than uploading.
OptimumOnline (Cablevision) offers 100Mb/s down and 15 Mb/s up, FWIW.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
I'm jealous, but so far no one has posted that they get the speeds that the previous poster claimed (1Gb/s to the residence).
The only time I had access to 1Gb/s was when I worked for a large hosting provider. I'd attach my laptop directly to the switch, but the laptop only had a 100Mb/s port. I'd watch my utilization (we monitored all ports, including the one left for my laptop), and it was pretty rare for me to reach high bandwidth utilization.
Really, I can see it as affordable for providers to offer these high speeds, as they know they will rarely be utilized. Providers oversell bandwidth all the time. Offering 100Mb/s can frequently mean that they've given 10,000 customers 100Mb/s on their GigE circuit, and even still they won't reach 80% utilization on it. If you've ever monitored an office switch, you'll see people in the office have occasional peaks, but the overall curve is pretty tame across the work day. So as to not annoy the other office folks, if I needed ISO's, I'd start their downloads at the end of the work day after everyone left, and I could see my spike when I looked in the morning. That kind of monitoring is useful to catch office folks who have viruses on their machines. I'd walk to their desk and ask "are you uploading something?" When they say no, we'd start looking for malware.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The Cisco 3750 or 3560 lines with IP Services on them will route just fine and are a much smaller package. Most MetroEthernet installs around here have the 3750 Metro edition as the CPE equipment.
The ASA line which replaced the PIX still uses an Intel processor. Albeit a P4 or Celeron depending on the model.
Hmmm.. Ya, that'd do it too. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
MikroTik... Not the cheapest, but if you want a really good wireless access point, you cannot beat them, plus you can build to your own config with many vendors (and radio choices) 9 port WAP with 2 radios, can't beat 'em, fully configurable router. Will run you 150-200 depending on your config. Nearly close to 1 watt output also.
Here's a good chart showing actual throughput for a bunch of different routers
.
$ iperf -c 10.xx.xx.xx
(removed for lameness filter)
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.06 GBytes 907 Mbits/sec
No jumbo frames, going through a couple of cheap airlink gig switches.
Server is nVidia onboard gigabit, server is Intel onboard gigabit on a cheap consumer board.
.
Whoops, that second server should be client.
.
DDWRT is not really opensource since a dickhead in charge of it started ripping off opensource work for a profit.
Dlink DIR-825 is a fair opensource 802.11N router with complete source code available + a GbE switch.
Considering I pay over $225/mo for crap cable and a 25/4 connection in the US, I would say that's not a horrible deal at all.