Modern home networking.

[tyggerjai]

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?

Comments

[jeamland]

I've got a Netcomm NB6Plus4W as my primary gateway now. Not only does it do everything what I need as a gateway/router device, it does dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 which Internode's currently trialling so I get to be even more nerdy than usual.

[http://mexico.purplecow.org/openid/andre]

I've never been that thrilled with the little consumer routers, even running third-party firmware. They seem to strain under heavy load and as speeds go up the problem is more obvious. The key shitter seems to be the small NAT table, where upon your ssh sessions drop out when a torrent fires up.

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)