Author Topic: What router do you use?  (Read 27212 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Seg

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 71
  • Country: us
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #25 on: December 02, 2014, 05:55:03 am »
Linksys has gone to crap since the WRT54G, Cisco ruined them. Had a E4200 v1 that lasted a year before it just up and died. Avoid Linksys.

Replaced it with a Netgear WNDR4300, running OpenWRT compiled straight out of the dev tree. Works nice, it has taken over file serving duty and everything.
« Last Edit: December 02, 2014, 09:20:47 am by Seg »
 

Offline electronics-whiz

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 74
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #26 on: December 02, 2014, 06:25:47 am »
I first had a Belkin lasted 6 mo before started dropping out. Everyone i know says Belkin routers are bad news.  :palm:
I replaced with refurb Netgear lasted 3 yrs, then started deciding to block sites for no apparent reason.
I replaced it with an ASUS RTN65U. Has an annoying UI wizard on setup, but  that's just because i know that i'm doing and would rather do myself. I got my router from newegg on special like a $130 router i got with rebate, and 128GB usb 3.0 stick to use with it for about $80.

One really nice thing is that unlike every other router i have had if the modem decides to be stupid and lock up and need reboot i can just do it without having to reboot the router too. I understand why most need that, but this one seems to have no issue with it. Good job ASUS I think it runs something called ASUS wrt which is i guess a custom ASUS version of DDWRT. What I've seen many gamer types with the new 802.11AC ASUS routers see to be one of the more popular.
 

Offline Stonent

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 3824
  • Country: us
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #27 on: December 02, 2014, 04:19:09 pm »
If you're going to spend $150 you might as well got for an AC router. With both channels running with Spacial Division Multiple Access, and a client that supports dual channels you can get around 1.3Gb/s throughput.

At work we just upgraded to Cisco N WAPs (a generation behind Wireless AC) and wow the difference between that and G was amazing.
The larger the government, the smaller the citizen.
 

Offline GreyWoolfeTopic starter

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 3649
  • Country: us
  • NW0LF
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #28 on: December 02, 2014, 07:03:23 pm »
When I was in the business there was an adage that 'you never got sacked for specifying Cisco'. I don't necessarily agree with that adage but what is your context; personal, small, medium or corporate business? It does make a difference.

It is for personal use.  Not a big network here.  I have 2 networked printers, 2 wired computers, 4 laptops, 3 cell phones and 4 tablets.


I replaced it with an ASUS RTN65U. Has an annoying UI wizard on setup, but  that's just because i know that i'm doing and would rather do myself. I got my router from newegg on special like a $130 router i got with rebate, and 128GB usb 3.0 stick to use with it for about $80.

One really nice thing is that unlike every other router i have had if the modem decides to be stupid and lock up and need reboot i can just do it without having to reboot the router too. I understand why most need that, but this one seems to have no issue with it. Good job ASUS I think it runs something called ASUS wrt which is i guess a custom ASUS version of DDWRT. What I've seen many gamer types with the new 802.11AC ASUS routers see to be one of the more popular.

I am actually contemplating the ASUS RTN66U.  I like the external antennas.  My office is in the back corner of an 1800 ft2 ranch style house and I want to make sure that there is pretty good coverage.  There is nothing here running 802.11AC, 3 of the 4 laptops are wireless N.  I am not sure about the tablets.  It is a shame to hear that Cisco has mucked up Linksys.  I have had Linksys for years.  I like the extra features the new routers have like guest accounts and the USB ports for some basic file sharing-no videos just documents and maybe some photos.  I will also look at the RTN65U.  After looking around, I think ASUS is the way for me to go.  As long as the network stays up and SWMBO has her internet then I am happy.
"Heaven has been described as the place that once you get there all the dogs you ever loved run up to greet you."
 

Offline Dave Turner

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 447
  • Country: gb
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #29 on: December 02, 2014, 11:28:35 pm »
GreyWoolfe - understood. 

For home use I just use the British Telecom supplied router/switch combination. It's sufficient for my usage.
 

Offline extide

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 95
  • Country: us
    • Rovitracker - Rental management AND Real-Time data!
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #30 on: December 02, 2014, 11:39:06 pm »
I use pfSense as well. I would NEVER go back to some consumer grade garbage!
 

Offline Zucca

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 4298
  • Country: it
  • EE meid in Itali
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #31 on: December 03, 2014, 03:01:29 am »
I replaced the glorious WRT54G with the asus rt-n66u running Shibby FW.
It has a mini SD card has a Easter egg inside, and 2 USB port for your HD (BTW build a NAS PC with FreeNAS, as suggested).

I am very happy, rock solid and good FW support/Community.

EDIT: blown away by pfSense! Thanks eev forum!
« Last Edit: December 03, 2014, 05:18:47 am by zucca »
Can't know what you don't love. St. Augustine
Can't love what you don't know. Zucca
 

Offline Neganur

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 1138
  • Country: fi
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #32 on: December 03, 2014, 06:22:20 am »
What do people use when they have say, 350 Mbps broadband?

Most of the routers I looked at don't support that kind of WAN->LAN speed above some 50 Mbps with anything firewall or NAT running. Firewalls and routers get _really_ expensive at that point (400 EUR and above for example ZyXEL ZyWall 110)
 

Online coppice

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8605
  • Country: gb
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #33 on: December 03, 2014, 07:37:08 am »
What do people use when they have say, 350 Mbps broadband?

Most of the routers I looked at don't support that kind of WAN->LAN speed above some 50 Mbps with anything firewall or NAT running. Firewalls and routers get _really_ expensive at that point (400 EUR and above for example ZyXEL ZyWall 110)
We have had 1Gbps up and down broadband at home for about 3 years. When it was first installed it was really hard to find consumer routers which could keep it busy. If you want to send lots of small packets, like VoIP, that's still true. For most people's usage a lot of recent routers, especially the 802.11ac ones, can keep a 1Gbps connection pretty much fully loaded with large packets while firewalling.

I put together a small Linux machine with one of the low power variants of the i3 (I think its the Sandy Bridge generation). I used an Intel motherboard, which generally use several watts less than most other makes. I guess they use efficient VRMs, rather than ones which are overclocking friendly. That machine can keep the link busy with small or large packets, without consuming unreasonable amounts of power.
 

Offline Jeroen3

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 4067
  • Country: nl
  • Embedded Engineer
    • jeroen3.nl
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #34 on: December 03, 2014, 08:13:20 am »
What do people use when they have say, 350 Mbps broadband?
You'll lose at least €100 ($150) for a router for fiber.
But if you can afford fiber you should be able to afford a router, or get one "for free" from the isp.
Our ISP (dutch KPN) forcibly leases you a router worth approx €200 if bought "new". Unfortunately, they screwed it up to a worth and performance of a potato. (it doesn't support WAN-UDP and lan-multicast properly)

It's an investment of a few years, say it'll work for three years, you'll pay 70 per year for your (hopefully) trouble-free superspeed internet router.  :)
 

Offline rollatorwieltje

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 571
  • Country: nl
  • I brick your boards.
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #35 on: December 03, 2014, 09:41:17 am »
I use a Supermicro X7SPA-HF ITX board, it has an Atom D510 and 2x Intel Gigabit NICs (on PCIe, be aware that a conventional PCI bus is too slow for 2x gigabit).
In a test setup I could do torrents at 400 mbit. I don't recall it maxing out the CPU, but I didn't bother looking into it further as I only have a 120 mbit connection anyway. 400 mbit smells like a maxed out harddrive of one of the test computers.
It has been running 24/7 since Feb 2011, no problems with it at all. Only reason for reboot is a software update which has been 500+ days ago, don't tell anybody.
 

Offline SteveyG

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 987
  • Country: gb
  • Soldering Equipment Guru
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #36 on: December 03, 2014, 11:24:25 am »
What do people use when they have say, 350 Mbps broadband?

Most of the routers I looked at don't support that kind of WAN->LAN speed above some 50 Mbps with anything firewall or NAT running. Firewalls and routers get _really_ expensive at that point (400 EUR and above for example ZyXEL ZyWall 110)

Even a fairly basic pfSense setup is good for 1Gbps.
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/sdgelectronics/
Use code: “SDG5” to get 5% off JBC Equipment at Kaisertech
 

Offline Zucca

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 4298
  • Country: it
  • EE meid in Itali
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #37 on: December 03, 2014, 02:22:53 pm »
I could have in my hands for 75$ a Dual 64 bit Xeon 3.6 Ghz CPUs with 16GB RAM.
mmmmm.... Let´s add a used Intel quad NIC PCI-X and a  used SSD I will be around max 150$ total.

Stupid overkill for pfSense? I am thinking for that amount of money it could make sense (forgive me for this nosense... probably), yes it will be more than an 11W mini ATX PC and the electric bill will go up.

Since it must be a 24/7 machine the dilemma is always go old, power consumption inefficient and cheap but tons of horse power (no worrires about installing packages, load traffic and so on or faster future ISP connection or whatever) or go in the other direction with a new/lightly used machine. (Praying the old machine will last for at least 5 years?)

Sorry I have some experience with FreeBDS but none with pfSense... so it is difficoult for me to judge.

Ah, it is for my home and yes when I design something I love to overkill if it is cheap.

Can't know what you don't love. St. Augustine
Can't love what you don't know. Zucca
 

Offline StanleyAdams

  • Newbie
  • Posts: 7
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #38 on: December 03, 2014, 05:06:38 pm »
Linksys and some Cisco equipment are notorious for the elec. caps. I can't remember what brand they were, but if you get  a product that has those, don't expect it to work for more than a year. I've changed bulged up caps on 3-4 linksys products so far. Last one was one of the EA series (can't remember the exact model).

Get an Asus router, Dark Knight. Very stable, very good range and fast. If you're on a budget TP-link.
 

Offline SteveyG

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 987
  • Country: gb
  • Soldering Equipment Guru
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #39 on: December 03, 2014, 05:14:54 pm »
I could have in my hands for 75$ a Dual 64 bit Xeon 3.6 Ghz CPUs with 16GB RAM.
mmmmm.... Let´s add a used Intel quad NIC PCI-X and a  used SSD I will be around max 150$ total.

Stupid overkill for pfSense? I am thinking for that amount of money it could make sense (forgive me for this nosense... probably), yes it will be more than an 11W mini ATX PC and the electric bill will go up.

Since it must be a 24/7 machine the dilemma is always go old, power consumption inefficient and cheap but tons of horse power (no worrires about installing packages, load traffic and so on or faster future ISP connection or whatever) or go in the other direction with a new/lightly used machine. (Praying the old machine will last for at least 5 years?)

Sorry I have some experience with FreeBDS but none with pfSense... so it is difficoult for me to judge.

Ah, it is for my home and yes when I design something I love to overkill if it is cheap.

Personally I'd buy a small atom based mini-ITX board and an Intel dual NIC for a pfSense setup. You should be able to set something up for that money that is cheap to run but still fast enough. I'm running a server with two quad core Xeons which on it's own is drawing over 300W continuously :(
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/sdgelectronics/
Use code: “SDG5” to get 5% off JBC Equipment at Kaisertech
 

Offline madires

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7695
  • Country: de
  • A qualified hobbyist ;)
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #40 on: December 03, 2014, 05:57:25 pm »
Any experinces with dd-wrt and a  TL-WDR4300 ?

The TL-WDR4300 runs great with openwrt.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2014, 06:00:50 pm by madires »
 

Offline true

  • Frequent Contributor
  • **
  • Posts: 329
  • Country: us
  • INTERNET
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #41 on: December 04, 2014, 01:12:30 am »
Most of our installs are 1043nd as most customers have no idea how their WiFi works much less how to grunt a greeting properly and have so much money they don't have neighbors.
If they are that rich don't they need the extra capacity at 5GHz for their own use?  :)
Again. They have no idea how WiFi works. Should be taken then that they have no idea how their electronics and computers work, they just cry about it not working at every edge of their property. Sending emails and watching Netflix is super important! (obviously no, no capacity issues)


Any experinces with dd-wrt and a  TL-WDR4300 ?

The TL-WDR4300 runs great with openwrt.
Early models had issues with overheating.

Any model you find now shouldn't have this problem.
 

n45048

  • Guest
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #42 on: December 04, 2014, 02:01:20 am »
I'm running a server with two quad core Xeons which on it's own is drawing over 300W continuously :(

That seems excessive. My entire server rack pulls about 400 watts which includes 1x 1RU Xeon server, 2x Dual Xeon servers (one has 8 hard disks), 2x switches and some other small bits. My desktop PC uses about 85 watts which is a single Xeon machine with a 30" Dell UltraSharp monitor (this is all at 240v line voltage mind you).
 

Online coppice

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 8605
  • Country: gb
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #43 on: December 04, 2014, 02:07:07 am »
Personally I'd buy a small atom based mini-ITX board and an Intel dual NIC for a pfSense setup.
The Atom ITX boards are good choices because a number of them have multiple NICs on the board, and they are typically the better NICs for some reason (Low end Atoms have the high end NICs. High end I7s have the cheap NICs. Why?). Non-Atom choices usually require adding a NIC card, which can increase the height, and stop you using a very compact case.
 

Offline TSL

  • Regular Contributor
  • *
  • Posts: 243
  • Country: au
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #44 on: December 04, 2014, 06:29:00 am »
I'll add my support to the PfSense crowd, I'm running that here too.

Its running on a HP-t5740 Intel Atom N280 thin client re-tasked, easily achieves +500Mbs throughput.

Previously was using a PCengines ALIX 2D2 which was fine until I started running dual stack IPv4/IPv6 and then it started to run out of memory on some tasks.

Do a search on pfsense on ebay and you'll find many prebuilt units over various power.

regards
Tim
VK2XAX :: QF56if :: BMARC :: WIA :: AMSATVK
 

Offline Zucca

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 4298
  • Country: it
  • EE meid in Itali
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #45 on: December 04, 2014, 09:44:01 am »
Sorry I have some experience with FreeBDS but none with pfSense... so it is difficoult for me to judge.
Ah, it is for my home and yes when I design something I love to overkill if it is cheap.

Project stopped due to noisy fan: 65dB after the booting phase is too much in a home enviroment. Tempted to buy it and then monkey around with mineral oil in order to keep it quiet but cool. I already know it whould be another project start with no end, so I pass thanks.
Can't know what you don't love. St. Augustine
Can't love what you don't know. Zucca
 

Online bingo600

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 1977
  • Country: dk
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #46 on: December 04, 2014, 11:08:37 am »
Any experinces with dd-wrt and a  TL-WDR4300 ?

The TL-WDR4300 runs great with openwrt.

I have no experience with openwrt , only used dd-wrt on WRT54G's

I need openvpn client support , as it's going to open a VPN tunnel towards my linux server.

Any quick start guides for openwrt ?
I could start out on my wrt54g , just to get the feeling of it.

/Bingo
 

Offline StanleyAdams

  • Newbie
  • Posts: 7
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #47 on: December 04, 2014, 12:20:53 pm »
Actually any OS with support for pf will do just fine for this purpose. I used to run an old PC with OpenBSD as a router for years. Won't consider it now cause of practical constraints. Right now I'm using a MikroTik RouterBoard, it's not the most intuitive thing to configure, but small/low power and relatively inexpensive, yet it allows for very advanced configurations, it's practically a router with a managed switch built in. I use an Asus dark knight as a wireless access point and switch. If you decide to use a homegrown solution anything with pf is much more robust than linux with iptables for this purpose. The rules are much more intuitive to set up in pf than iptables.
 

Offline madires

  • Super Contributor
  • ***
  • Posts: 7695
  • Country: de
  • A qualified hobbyist ;)
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #48 on: December 04, 2014, 12:36:13 pm »
I have no experience with openwrt , only used dd-wrt on WRT54G's

I need openvpn client support , as it's going to open a VPN tunnel towards my linux server.

Any quick start guides for openwrt ?
I could start out on my wrt54g , just to get the feeling of it.

Openvpn is no problem. BTW, you should update your openvpn server (major vulnerability found). A good starting point would be http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/start for the basics. Download and flash firmware (Barrier Breaker), telnet 192.168.1.1, change root password with "passwd" and logout. After that you'll use ssh for shell access or the web-UI which is pretty straight forward. For special stuff you should read the references/tutorials and check out "uci".

PS: openwrt has full IPv6 support.
« Last Edit: December 04, 2014, 12:39:02 pm by madires »
 

Offline rollatorwieltje

  • Supporter
  • ****
  • Posts: 571
  • Country: nl
  • I brick your boards.
Re: What router do you use?
« Reply #49 on: December 04, 2014, 06:35:54 pm »
Sorry I have some experience with FreeBDS but none with pfSense... so it is difficoult for me to judge.
Ah, it is for my home and yes when I design something I love to overkill if it is cheap.

Project stopped due to noisy fan: 65dB after the booting phase is too much in a home enviroment. Tempted to buy it and then monkey around with mineral oil in order to keep it quiet but cool. I already know it whould be another project start with no end, so I pass thanks.
There's really no point in using such a heavy machine. Look at the Vyatta 3500 series, they used a mid-range Xeon with 3GB ram to run a device that can handle a small company. That's already gross overkill for home use. I think they claimed 20 Gbps throughput.
 


Share me

Digg  Facebook  SlashDot  Delicious  Technorati  Twitter  Google  Yahoo
Smf