LF perfect DIY router. (ALIX, Soekris, Routerboard, something else?)

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ponky

Limp Gawd
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Nov 27, 2012
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I've been looking for a small, low power system that runs pfSense or m0n0wall and is able to NAT my 100/10 home connection while acting as a wlan ap.

ALIX 2d13 seemed too good to be true, but then I read about the performance of those 100/10 nics, bleh.

Soekris 4521 looks pretty solid too, but again only 100/10 ethernet. Also it's EOL.

RouterBOARD 433UAH, my 3rd option. I'm semi-familiar with RouterOS but I would prefer to use pfSense for this.


Does anyone here have ALIX/Soekris hooked up to 100+ downstream? I'd really like to see some benchmarks.
 
Supermicro X10SBA-L. It comes iwth a four-core 2Ghz (2.4 burst) J1900 CPU, Intel NICs, and 2 SATA. Bump up to the X10SBA for additional SATA, mSATA, and mini-PCIe. With RAM, case, and PSU you should be able to put together a nice system for ~$250-300.

I really want to like the Soekris stuff, but they're awfully expensive for what they are and always seem to be one or two generations behind (though they do have some nice features/options).

That PC Engines board uses Realtek NICs, which for me is a turn-off.

Another option is the Edgemax Lite at ~$100. The GUI is limited, but if you're OK with a CLI it's something to consider.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
Supermicro X10SBA-L. It comes iwth a four-core 2Ghz (2.4 burst) J1900 CPU, Intel NICs, and 2 SATA. Bump up to the X10SBA for additional SATA, mSATA, and mini-PCIe. With RAM, case, and PSU you should be able to put together a nice system for ~$250-300.

I really want to like the Soekris stuff, but they're awfully expensive for what they are and always seem to be one or two generations behind (though they do have some nice features/options).

That PC Engines board uses Realtek NICs, which for me is a turn-off.

Another option is the Edgemax Lite at ~$100. The GUI is limited, but if you're OK with a CLI it's something to consider.
Click to expand...

250-300? that board alone is like 230.... add a decent case/mem and a decent msata you're looking more like 400-450
 
Discarding outlets with out-of-whack pricing:

X10SBA-L retail: averaging ~$150. OEM: averaging ~$140. The X10SBA looks to be ~$15 more. Perhaps you were thinking of the A1SAi-2550F, which runs ~$250?

4GB RAM: ~$50. 8GB is ~$80

mITX case w/PSU: ~$50 . Or ~$100 for the recommended Supermicro rackmount.

USB boot drive: <$10. (no real need for a SATA drive unless running some plugins e.g., Squid, Snort, etc.)
 
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Use a NUC and VLAN, I doubt you'll max out 500+ mbit (not sure if pfsense supports that though)
//Danne
 
ponky said:
Realtek NICs = no go.

I just saw a benchmark of 2d13 giving 95/95, so it might be just good enough.
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Realtek Gbit on a massively faster CPU is a no go, but VIA (even crappier) 100Mbit on a dinosaur CPU might be good enough.

That makes absolutely no sense.
 
TCM2 said:
Realtek Gbit on a massively faster CPU is a no go, but VIA (even crappier) 100Mbit on a dinosaur CPU might be good enough.

That makes absolutely no sense.
Click to expand...

I've had way too much problems with Realtek stuff on non-Windows platforms. There are others. If I get to choose I'd take Intel ethernet + Atheros wireless.

Haven't really noticed any complains about VIA.
 
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I've got several alix 2d13 boards. Rock solid. They run OpenWRT extremely well. A little light on memory for anything else. pfSense will run but the OS timers are not fast enough to do decent QoS on it. On Linux it smokes.
 
Arch said:
I've got several alix 2d13 boards. Rock solid. They run OpenWRT extremely well. A little light on memory for anything else. pfSense will run but the OS timers are not fast enough to do decent QoS on it. On Linux it smokes.
Click to expand...

Could you, by any chance, run some benchmarks on one of them? I'd like to see max throughput when in simple NAT-mode, no VPNs or other stuff running.
 
I've done benchmarks previously. With OpenWRT it'll do around 50k packets/sec at 64 byte frame sizes. It will do line rate at higher (100meg) at larger frame sizes.
 
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