Daniel Pocock <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Daniel,
> My ISP is upgrading my connection to gigabit on Friday and I suspect my > current router may struggle with it. > > My existing router runs OpenWRT but I've found the firewall and IPsec > setup is a little bit constrained in that environment and it is tempting > to move to a router running a full OS. > > I've seen a lot of discussions about making DIY routers running a free > OS like Debian, FreeBSD or OpenBSD and I was tempted to go with > something like that running Shorewall, strongSwan, DHCP and DNS. Maybe > it will also do wifi or maybe the existing router will be a bridge to wifi. > > Can anybody share any comments or links about this topic? > > - quiet (fanless), low-power and low cost hardware suitable for Gigabit > routing and maybe use as a NAS too. It would also be useful to have > fibre support in the router and avoid using a media convertor. > > - are there any live builds or other out-of-the-box solutions that > address this use case particularly well? My recommendation if you basically want a fanless mini PC is the PC Engines APU (2C4 for example). Quadcore 1GHz amd64 with AES-NI, 4 GB RAM, 3 GE ports, USB 3.0 external. I recommend using a M2 SSD for boot media. With PSU and case it starts around 220 EUR. Debian works out of the box. You can also have a look at the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter line. There are models with SFP slot available, even the small models are supposed to be able to support GE throughput and are < 100 EUR. They are MIPS Cavium boards with a custom kernel, but you can get a rootshell and there is a Debian (I think Wheezy at the moment) userland on it. I don't think you can get the hardware to be fully-free running a vanilla Debian, so YMMV. Best Regards, Bernhard
