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]

The problem isn't running PPPoE, it's supporting the actual ADSL controller. Most of the devices on the market at the moment are built around chipsets from either Atheros or Broadcom and from memory (may be utterly wrong) Broadcom is either the only one with a combo WiFi/ADSL set or is at least the clear leader in terms of units out there. The chipsets are all built as a MIPS core with a RAM controller, ethernet MAC, USB controller, WiFi MAC and optional ADSL controller. All the devices run Linux, generally, but Broadcom at least don't have source available for their ADSL driver module and nobody's reverse engineered it yet.

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.

[tyggerjai]

Fascinating...

But long story short, modern ADSL modem/routers basically do everything one would need for home firewall stuff.

[jeamland]

Yep. The NB6 will even let you get to a shell prompt via telnet if you ask nicely. I have no idea how long any hand-done config tweaks will last if you frob via the web interface or reboot though. It's all fairly standard stuff under the hood.