
Matt Mullenweg on Multi-WAN Routers - brm
http://ma.tt/2011/03/peplink-review/
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jrockway
Wow, interesting. I would never think to buy some dedicated product to do
something like this. I would find an old box somewhere, install OpenBSD, and
resume my day.

I have a Soekris net5501 that I use as a router and it does 100MBps between
two of the NICs without much trouble (with pf). I have a Gigabit NIC in there
and it manages to push around 300-400MBps between it and another box on the
network (with an admittedly shitty NIC that craps out on any frame bigger than
1500 bytes).

The gigabit NIC uses more power than the box itself. A whole x86 machine with
5 NICs running the latest version of a modern OS that uses less than 20W of
power. And of course no fan or other moving parts.

Anyway, copying packets from one network to another is not a particularly
difficult task. "pass out keep state" is similarly simple. So really, this is
a task that doesn't require a "vendor", it simply requires a computer that has
more than 32M of RAM that can talk to NICs.

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joshu
Are soekris' still the way to go to build an embedded router?

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The_Fox
For the product I work on (a connection bonding appliance & service), we've
used Soekris devices but have found them to be underpowered compared to newer
Atom-based products from Portwell [1] and Lanner [2]. Geode-based products are
fine if all you're doing is basic firewall, routing, and VPN stuff. Apparently
Soekris is soon to introduce their own Atom device.

Another option is a Linux netbook configured with VLANs to get around having
only a single NIC. Then if you lock yourself out via the network, you have a
keyboard and monitor built-in and don't have to go find the serial cable in
your stuff-you-hoped-you'd-never-have-to-use-again box.

[1] <http://www.portwell.com/products/ca.asp#SOHO> [2]
[http://www.lannerinc.com/Network_Application_Platforms/x86_N...](http://www.lannerinc.com/Network_Application_Platforms/x86_Network_Appliance/Desktop-
Fanless_Appliances)

~~~
joshu
wow, that's exactly what i wanted - thanks!

(obGripe. wish these companies would make it easier to buy stuff online...)

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bryanlarsen
Most people don't have 2 50Mbps providers like Matt does, so most of us don't
need fancy hardware to do this. You can install OpenWRT on pretty much any
cheap router to do this. (The Linksys WRT54GL is the canonical example).

I haven't tried it myself.

<http://www.guideband.com/datasheets/EQ-NR-041-guide.pdf>

~~~
ChuckMcM
Having recently needed to replace a router running DD-WRT I discovered that
much to my dismay routers that can run *WRT are becoming less and less
available. I suppose this isn't too surprising but it did annoy me.

I ended up with a TP-Link access point (one of the challenges was getting an
access point rather than a router) and it has so far worked out.

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ck2
Careful Matt, you almost promoted bbPress standalone.

