Grant Robinson wrote:
My suggestion doesn't fit in the < $100 price range, but my favorite
general-purpose router that I have ever used is a Soekris[1] box.
They are about the size of a your typical home router (such as a
linksys wrt54g). Setup is pretty simple:
1) Download image of m0n0wall or shorewall or other firewall/router
distro
2) use dd to copy it to CF card
3) insert CF card into Soekris box, and power on
You can find better directions than that on the web, but you get the
idea.
They cost more than your average home router, but they also are MUCH
more stable. Just to give you an example, I have one hooked up to a
fiber connection that serves a block of public IP's, and acts as a
firewall and router for those IPs. It sustains a pretty consistent
load of 3-5 Mbps, with spikes up to 20 or 30 Mbps and has not needed
to be rebooted in a LONG time. In fact, I don't remember EVER having
to reboot it, which means if it has happened, it hasn't happened very
often. I run m0n0wall, but you can run a variety of operating systems
on it. m0n0wall is FreeBSD-based, has a web configuration, and can do
just about anything you would want and/or need.
If you aren't down with the price, a good second choice is to use a
Linksys WRT-54* (WRT-54GS, etc) model that allows you to use OpenWRT,
and use that as your router. I've had much better stability with
OpenWRT on consumer-grade routers than with the built-in software.
Grant
[1] <http://www.soekris.com/>
While the soekris option is awesome, it is a little pricey. There is
another board that is about half the price but it is still over $100. It
is the PC Engines ALIX board. (http://pcengines.ch/alix2.htm). I bought
one for myself from mini-box.com and it cost me ~130 for the board, like
20 for power supply and case, and 10 for a cf card. I am putting linux
on it but pfSense is a great option. So it is about 160 total. A soekris
option will probably be over 200 for just the board.
If the price is too high still, Linksys WRT54GL is still an awesome
router. Especially when coupled with OpenWRT and X-wrt. Decent web
interface and the ability to do basically what ever you want to it. They
are usually about 60 on newegg.
There is my $.02.
Mike
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