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ConstantineM
join:2011-09-02
San Jose, CA

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ConstantineM

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Pentium 4 3GHz is the worst hardware for a home router

The hardware advice in this article is really as bad as it could possibly get. Pentium 4, with upper clock speeds, is most certainly at the top of most power consumptive processors out there. Unless you get free electricity or live somewhere where it's always cold and using Pentium 4 as a space heater would make sense, It'll probably be cheaper to buy some used enterprise hardware than run a Pentium 4 as a router for just a couple of years.

For people looking into self-made x86 routers, I would highly suggest exploring the cheapo netbook market: for a mere 200 bucks new, plus a 20-dollar USB GigE stick, you can get yourself a nice little router with a free UPS, a free keyboard and "diagnostic display", and a pretty low power consumption and tiny size to top it off.

If you're getting the internet from an ONT (fibre-to-the-premises usually comes with an integrated UPS), this means, provided you do a wireless access point right out of the netbook-turned-router, you'll even have wireless internet when the power goes down, without any personal investment into any UPS solutions whatsoever! (-:

KrK
Heavy Artillery For The Little Guy
Premium Member
join:2000-01-17
Tulsa, OK
Netgear WNDR3700v2
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KrK

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You guys ever heard of the RaspberryPi? Unfortunately it only has one NIC, however. Still, hardware similar to this.... could surely fit the bill.

Noah Vail
Oh God please no.
Premium Member
join:2004-12-10
SouthAmerica

1 recommendation

Noah Vail to ConstantineM

Premium Member

to ConstantineM

I run a Pentium 4 3GHz HT for my home router

But then I have a mail server here and 2 Hyper-V servers hosting 12 VMs that users RDP into.

My pfSense router is on an old Dell P4HT that absolutely rocks in performance.

It fends off between 15k and 50k spam attempts every day.

I can have multiple instances of uTorrent with the QoS keeping my VoIP and RDP solid 100% of the time.

My uTorrent and Spam blocking require just under 500k CIDRs tabled in memory. They get referenced against most every packet.

At the same time I have squidGuard running as a content proxy and Unbound delivering DNSSEC to every machine here.

All the while my CPU avgs ~4-8%. I'm not sure an Atom would keep up with the demand.


Joe12345678
join:2003-07-22
Des Plaines, IL

Joe12345678 to ConstantineM

Member

to ConstantineM

Re: Pentium 4 3GHz is the worst hardware for a home router

USB E-net is a big cpu hog and no way to get gig-e out of that.
ConstantineM
join:2011-09-02
San Jose, CA

ConstantineM to KrK

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to KrK

RaspberryPI is a bunch of BS and binary blobs from Broadcom

RaspberryPI is a bunch of BS with no documentation and, subsequently, no open-source support (if you don't believe it, google what Theo de Raadt had to say about it).

If anything, the standard arm linux off-the-shelf routers are more available and are both cheaper and have better support than RaspberryPI.

The advantage of going x86, however, is that most of the router solutions featured over here don't run on the off-the-shelf arm-based routers at all. Most people praise pfSense (based on FreeBSD) or straight pf on OpenBSD, and both require x86 (unless you have some rare non-x86 hardware like landisk that OpenBSD does support, too). Personally, I think netbooks (w/ USB GigE sticks) is as best as you can get to the state-of-the-art DIY home router for the average home, both in terms of open architecture, price, space, power consumption, flexibility and, last but not least, the free integrated UPS. (-: (Of course, if you are a true power hungry user or simply have real broadband internet (like nearly noone in the US has — 18/1.5 is not broadband), a netbook processor and USB GigE may easily be the bottleneck.)

I'm looking forward to the time when someone will come up with a USB 3.0 to 4-port GigE switch, as well as USB 3.0 making it onto the netbooks. (-:

KrK
Heavy Artillery For The Little Guy
Premium Member
join:2000-01-17
Tulsa, OK
Netgear WNDR3700v2
Zoom 5341J

KrK

Premium Member

Click for full size
Here's what I have acting as a server.

It's a Gigabyte GA-H55M-SV2 running an Intel I3-550 (integrated video). It's running of all things, Vista Ultimate x64, I started with Windows XP Pro, but there was some sort of incompatibility (Slips my mind) and so Vista was the only other OS I own.

All it does is run a dedicated Minecraft Server, an FTP Server and stores backed up files, so not quite a router. The nice thing is that it only uses between 38 and 43 watts.
ConstantineM
join:2011-09-02
San Jose, CA

ConstantineM to Joe12345678

Member

to Joe12345678

Re: Pentium 4 3GHz is the worst hardware for a home router

That's a given; USB 2.0 is obviously limited by 480Mbps anyways, whereas GigE requires 2Gbps.

fifty nine
join:2002-09-25
Sussex, NJ

fifty nine to Noah Vail

Member

to Noah Vail

Re: I run a Pentium 4 3GHz HT for my home router

said by Noah Vail:

All the while my CPU avgs ~4-8%. I'm not sure an Atom would keep up with the demand.

[att=1]

My atom runs fine, no matter how much I do with my box (HAVP, Snort, squid). It's also dual core unlike your Pentium 4.

jap
Premium Member
join:2003-08-10
038xx

jap to ConstantineM

Premium Member

to ConstantineM

Re: RaspberryPI is a bunch of BS and binary blobs from Broadcom

said by ConstantineM:

RaspberryPI is a bunch of BS with no documentation and, subsequently, no open-source support (if you don't believe it, google what Theo de Raadt had to say about it).

Link please. Maybe my search skills suddenly suck. The ale certainly doesn't.

I want to see what sort of nutjob writes articles lambasting Raspberry Pi for lack of documentation & support. It's a deliberately uber cheap, half-baked learning tool for school kids created by a registered non-profit. It's not supposed to have any support or an abundance of documentation. de Raadt is an ass if he wrote the things you claim.

The fact that non-edu buyers are swarming to the board is actually a bit awkward. It undermines the applied learning challenge when semi-pro implementation solutions are everywhere. In any event the $25 price point, the overwhelming buzz, and the "buy one, give one" purchase incentive will get the board into the hands of many more students. Development of purpose-specific embedded linux devices is an excellent thing to be preparing young minds for. In my humble opinion.

To make amends for your vilifying ways I suggest you donate a dozen to your nearest, most under funded tech club or vocational training program.

- - - -

@Ryan, Sorry for taking the Raspberry Pi comments OT. Had to come to the defense of a good social project. Of course it's a ridiculous board for creating a deployable software router. To settle that the specs are here.

Count me in with the electricity/noise/heat/space issue of using old large formfactor hardware. Many early atom-based netbooks are being tossed and I'm wondering how robust a solution they are a good for. Not major enterprise but perhaps a better-than-consumer option adequate for small/med biz and big home net applications.

Noah Vail
Oh God please no.
Premium Member
join:2004-12-10
SouthAmerica

Noah Vail to fifty nine

Premium Member

to fifty nine

Re: I run a Pentium 4 3GHz HT for my home router

said by fifty nine:

My atom runs fine, no matter how much I do with my box (HAVP, Snort, squid). It's also dual core unlike your Pentium 4.

While HT isn't Dual Core, it isn't zero either - at least on this platform.
I've compared pfSense on P4s w/ and w/o HT and the performance gain was substantial.

Above P4s, I either run an AMD64 box or Dual Xeon 800MHz FSB w/ RAID 5 SATAs.
Whatever is cheap.

I've already got 8-10 Windows boxes at home + 2 HP 4000 Laserjets and who knows what else.
My customers are in Officeplexs and Industrial warehouses.

The $30 in power savings just isn't a strong selling point for me.
I do the environment thing by keeping old stuff out the landfill.

and
Today I added an IKE VPN to my pfSense config. 2048 bit PSK 3DES wrapped around a Blowfish encrypted ESP layer and the CPU still doesn't budge. Nyah.
ConstantineM
join:2011-09-02
San Jose, CA

ConstantineM to jap

Member

to jap

Raspberry PI w/ binary blobs from Broadcom still suck

You have no clue what you're talking about in regards to open-source systems programming.

From the official FAQ:
»www.raspberrypi.org/faqs
What hardware documentation will be available?

Broadcom don’t release a full datasheet for the BCM2835, which is the chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi. We will release a datasheet for the SoC which will cover the hardware exposed on the Raspi board e.g. the GPIOs. We will also release a board schematic later on.
...

Translation: we'll release 205 pages out of a 4000+ page document.

»www.raspberrypi.org/foru ··· atasheet
»www.raspberrypi.org/foru ··· /page-11

Compare and contrast:

»www.raspberrypi.org/wp-c ··· rals.pdf (205 pages)
»www.ti.com/lit/ug/spruh7 ··· h73c.pdf (4593 pages)

It doesn't take much Google skill to figure out that this question is indeed frequently asked and commented on, BTW. And it is also rather clear that the answer doesn't satisfy system programmers at all.

jap
Premium Member
join:2003-08-10
038xx

jap

Premium Member

said by ConstantineM:

You have no clue what you're talking about in regards to open-source systems programming.

You have no clue what you're talking about in regards to diving for sea urchins.

Forget about the de Raadt article. I'll assume his perspective is similarly fixated. Context is everything.
ConstantineM
join:2011-09-02
San Jose, CA

ConstantineM

Member

The difference being is that I'm not talking about diving for sea urchins.

Forget about Raspberry PI, you still don't even know who de Raadt is! He didn't write any articles! Context is indeed everything, and Raspberry PI is hardly worth being mentioned in unrelated discussions, let alone praised. Unless you intend to be teaching the pupils on NDA, corporate interests (and greed), undocumented hardware and reverse-engineering, of course! :-p