

ORP1 - An Open Router Project - ParadisoShlee
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/orp1-an-open-router-project/x/295408

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jlawer
It feels a little lightweight for the cost. I am not a hardware geek, but I
struggle to see what this gets me over a mini ITX board running an Dual Core
atom w/ a dual port Gigabit NIC running pfSense besides (what I assume is) a
lower power draw.

I also worry with all the packets going through the core processor and it only
being an 800mhz PPC. Is this going to be able to handle the traffic from a
100mbit connection w/ a protocol like bit torrent creating 100s of connections
and it having to NAT that traffic.

The major issues I see with Home routers is either complexity or performance.
Even here in Australia there exist a reasonable number of people who are able
to get 100mbits services on HFC / Fibre. If you were able to include an FGPA
that you could offload packet routing to you might have something interesting
(can affordable FPGAs do gigabit packet rates?). Obviously an ASIC requires a
fairly high production rate to be economical. Maybe a dual processor
configuration with a dedicated packet passing processor and an "Application
Processor".

I want to like this being its from my home city (Brisbane, Australia), but I
really can't see the value in it over other devices.

~~~
gonzo
pfSense guy here.

If you think a dual core D525 is the sh*t, just wait until you see an 8 core
OOE 'Atom' with AES-NI support, and 4 i350 GigE Ethernets running pfSense 2.2
(based on FreeBSD 10, so multi-core pf, etc...)

Or the dual core 4 x i350 variant for under $200.

yes, very low power.

~~~
jlawer
Cheers,

PFSense has been absolutely amazing for us, with us running 2 boxes to provide
routing for inter office links. We looked at it for our core routers about 1
1/2 years ago, and would have gone with it except for it not at that time
supporting our hardware in the stable release (ended up with Linux / IPtables
/ Keepalived due to time constraints). But our testbed (old PowerEdge R200
single dual core proc) handled everything we through at it. Certainly cheeper
then the Juniper quote we got...

I am really impressed with the upcoming generation of atoms. They seem like
they are going to be impressive in both networking and storage.

------
dredwerker
Seems expensive to me.

I didnt really look at the components or r&d involved. Is it that much better
than a tomato/dd-wrt based router?

