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Modern home networking.
Back in the day, of course, the cable that came out of our modem or cable modem or whatever went straight into a Linux box with various packet filtering stuff ( unless you were a rhesus monkey, and come to think of it, the original lioness was OpenBSD). These days, I suspect, no-one bothers, we just buy smarter ADSL modems in the first place. Is that the case, oh geeks? Has the wrt54g rendered the home gateway obsolete?
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So other than the IPv6, which is a nifty feature, that looks basically equivalent to the Linksys, which would be a "yes". Or perhaps a "no", depending on which bit of the question :)
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The only FOSSgeek solution that really works at the moment is to get the cheapest ADSL-capable device you can find, whack it in bridge mode and run it into something running the OS of your choice and getting it to talk PPPoE. Given I've got the NB6 (gateway + 802.11g), an AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and a Sipura SPA3000 (VoIP) clustered around my phone point I didn't really want to add extra boxes.
The other facet is that I've grown averse to blowing spare time dicking around with things when I feel I don't need to. Part of that is reflected in me being a Mac geek these days (no more Xorg.conf, wpa_supplicant.conf, hunting specific driver sources, etc, etc, etc) but also being quite happy to use devices like the NB6 et al instead of hand-rolling kit like I used to. The potentially strange thing is that I'm not overly upset by this. I used to care about it but now I have other things I want to work on and mucking around with those things would just take time away from those.
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And yes, I hear you on the spare time thing. It's like jwz's rants on Linux from whenever it was "Getting the foo card to work with bar isn't exciting. It's a solved problem", etc. Give me shit that works so I can do the stuff I want to do.
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Interestingly (he said, going off on a tangent) the ADSL chipset market is utterly dominated by these router-aimed chipsets to the point where you basically can't get any other ADSL controllers at that price point. So a company I did some work for a while back who had a PCI card that did ADSL1 rolled their ADSL2 card around one of the router chipsets with the ethernet MAC wired straight into a second PCI-based ethernet MAC and the host system just sees it as an ethernet interface.
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But long story short, modern ADSL modem/routers basically do everything one would need for home firewall stuff.
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Me? I'm using TP-Link modem, the cheapest with decent ADSL2+ Annex M support running in dumb bridged mode and an old Cisco 2651 doing the PPPoE termination. It's a pretty damn solid setup, although the 2651 has outlived _three_ ADSL modems now. The LinkSys I had went down with a model-specific outheating/dry-cap fault, the Netcomm would crash weekly (and weakly) the Speedtouch was orphaned by the manufacturer and ended up with no AnnexM and I assume the current TP-Link will probably expire in a year or so.
If I didn't have the Cisco, I'd probably do the PPPoE termination on a somewhat low-power BSD box - the old Sun V100 and T1 105 boxes run on bugger-all power and run OpenBSD nicely.
These days it ultimately boils down to what services you want and how much equipment you want to tinker with. I'm still pretty happy managing the Cisco kit and pretty happy to keep one big machine kicking around, so this is the winning move for me. Consider that if you like running a local proxy-cache, privoxy, DNS etc that you might as well just throw a box at it because no cheapie appliance is going to do a decent job on proxying.
If you have a bigger budget for the router, the Cisco 877-style boxes are rather nicely done. As are some of the Juniper SRX, which I'd switch to in a blink if one magically landed here.
(And I'd say screw Linksys and their WAG/WRT products, they're cheaply built with a shoddy reliability history)
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Though for all I know I'll need a new modem when I get back anyway if I want ADSL2, so I'll rethink it then. Cheers.
Oh, did I send you an email about coffee grinders?
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I didn't get an email about coffee grinders recently; might have been eaten by the etherbunnies? Send it again and I'll grep the logs if it doesn't turn up.
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Next step up is an Iberital Challenge, Nemox mumble, etc. Probably about $300.
Next step up is a second-hand commercial - like an old Super Jolly. These are fine instruments, although they use flat burrs, not conical (not that it really matters too much at this point). $150-500 condition dependant and remember they're two feet tall.
I've skipped a lot of options because I don't think they make good value-sense. There's a lot of expensive consumer devices but I'd rather get a second-hand commercial and potentially replace the burrs than pay a thousand bucks for consumer kit.
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