Hi Scott, Here in the UK, I use a Soekris NET5501 running pfSense as my firewall/router platform, talking PPPoE to the ISP via a dedicated Ethernet port to the modem.
In this configuration, I tried three different ADSL modems. All offered setup/management over HTTP on port 80. - Draytek Vigor 120 ADSL modem. Good and stable, even on my marginal DSL line, and seems to support all the latest DSL standards. - Billion BiPAC 5200. Not bad either, though it did occasionally retrain on my marginal DSL line. - D-Link DSL-320B. Least impressive of the bunch. It did work but, at least at the time of testing, the HTTP management GUI was far from polished, which was discouraging. I've been using the Draytek for a while now, and it's been solid. The only slightly odd thing is that the HTTP management GUI is unusable in Firefox for Mac (due to foreground and background colours clashing) but seems to work in all other browsers. The Draytek doesn't really need an IP address (since it runs PPPoE rather than doing routing) but if you give it an out-of-band RFC1918 address, you can always nip in on port 80 if you want to check the DSL line statistics, say. It doesn't support SNMP queries as far as I can tell, but I guess I could script up an HTTP query if I could be bothered. For everyday requirements, this all seems to work fine. However, I suspect the Soekris platform might be under-sized if you need sustained high traffic rates - say a couple of thousand packets per second. I've only observed problems when running a security sweep against a large number of remote target IPs - something that sends vast numbers of tiny packets. Under this load, the PPPoE link kept dropping and then restarting. Presumably this was caused by either the Soekris CPU or the modem's CPU having insufficient horsepower, but I'll probably never know for sure, as I just drove to the office and plugged into their fibre feed instead. Hope this helps. - Martin On 11 Mar 2010, at 02:30, Scott Newell wrote: > We're upgrading our ADSL connection at work, and I'm told we need to > get a new modem. (I guess the ancient Westell we're using now isn't > good enough anymore.) So, does anyone have a favorite model, or > models to avoid? It'll be connected to a '4521 acting as our router. > > thanks! > newell N5TNL > > _______________________________________________ > Soekris-tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
