[124452] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Home CPE choice
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Blake Pfankuch)
Wed Mar 31 19:36:28 2010
From: Blake Pfankuch <bpfankuch@cpgreeley.com>
To: Charles N Wyble <charles@knownelement.com>, "nanog@nanog.org"
<nanog@nanog.org>
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:34:38 -0600
In-Reply-To: <4BB3D2FF.7030608@knownelement.com>
X-MAIL-FROM: <bpfankuch@cpgreeley.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
I'm running IPcop on a mini ITX machine (old processor out of my laptop T55=
00), a cheapo stick of memory and a sata to CF adaptor with a 4gb CF card. =
All in all cost me about $350. Been running IPcop's for about 6 years now=
on various hardware going back to a dual p3 500 with 256mb of ram and no c=
omplaints aside from ipv6 support which is slated for the 2.x branch. I ha=
ve a 50/10 cable line which I have kept saturated for multiple days at a ti=
me, 5 public IP's about 60 firewall rules and 3 network interfaces (LAN, WA=
N and guest wireless). I migrated from a PPPOE dsl provider to cable about=
a year and a half ago. Also physically moved about that time and never po=
wered off the device, or had any issues whatsoever. =20
The UI is a bit weird, but once you set it up you never touch it.
17:16:19 up 568 days, 19:36, 0 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
-----Original Message-----
From: Charles N Wyble [mailto:charles@knownelement.com]=20
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 4:56 PM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Home CPE choice
Hopefully this e-mail is considered operational content :)
The recent thread on the new linkys kit and ipv6 support got me thinking ab=
out CPE choice.
What good off the shelf solutions are out there? Should one buy the high en=
d d-link/linksys/netgear products? I've had bad experiences with those (net=
gear in particular).
Should one get a "real" cisco router? The 877 or something? Maybe an ASA or=
the new small business targeted ISR (can't recall the model number off han=
d right now). There is mikrotik but I'm not so sure about the operating sys=
tem.
Is there a market for a new breed of CPE running OpenWRT or pfsense on hard=
ware with enough CPU/RAM to not fall over?
Granted that won't cost $79.00 at best buy. However it seems to me that dec=
ent CPE is going to run a couple hundred dollars in order to have sufficien=
t ram/cpu.
My current home router is a cisco 1841. I keep my 6mbps DSL line pretty muc=
h saturated all the time. Often times my wife will be watching Hulu in the =
living room, I'll be streaming music and running torrents (granted I have t=
uned my Azures client fairly well) all at the same time and it's a good exp=
erience. Running that kind of traffic load through my linksys would cause =
it to need a reboot once or more a day.
What are folks here running in SOHO environments that doesn't require too f=
requent oil changes :)
