Linksys vs Linux

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c3141hf

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I recently replaced a Linksys "Router" (WRT54G) with a dedicated Linux server. I don't know why I used the Linksys gateway for so long.

With the Linksys, atl.speakeasy.net was giving me a download rating of 3200 mbps.
With my Linux box, I now get ~4500 mbps.

My past Linksys "Router" did the same thing as well as a Netgear one. Not to mention that I also get a true stateful firewall and advanced traffic shaping/qos with the Linux box. And it's wireless.

Then you have completly silly security vulnerabilitys that Linksys "Routers" have such as this one :
http://hypoclear.cjb.net/hypo_linksys_advisory.txt

All you need is a 400 mhz computer with a wireless card and an ethernet adapater. You can additionally add a second ethernet adapter if you want to make a wired network as well. The wireless card needs to be able to run in master mode (currently Atheros and Prism based cards, with experiemental support for Texas Instruments based ones).

Even if you don't know Linux, there are very good instruction manuals online on how to do this :
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Building_a_Wireless_Access_Point_With_Gentoo
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/home-router-howto.xml#doc_chap5
 
damicatz said:
advanced traffic shaping/qos with the Linux box.
Click to expand...

Now the rest of the stuff is cool and all, but I see people plugging this fairly frequently, and it doesn't really do anything. The traffic shaping is only going to allow you to throttle your own traffic, which is really a benefit mostly when you do not directly control all the machines on your network, so that you cannot throttle stuff like torrents at the desktop.
And QoS won't do anything. Your ISP is not going to honor your QoS tags, so they are just going to be dropped as soon as they hit your service provider network (unless you have a leased line with the QoS trust angle negotiated in to the contract).
 
Darkstar850 said:
Now the rest of the stuff is cool and all, but I see people plugging this fairly frequently, and it doesn't really do anything. The traffic shaping is only going to allow you to throttle your own traffic, which is really a benefit mostly when you do not directly control all the machines on your network, so that you cannot throttle stuff like torrents at the desktop.
And QoS won't do anything. Your ISP is not going to honor your QoS tags, so they are just going to be dropped as soon as they hit your service provider network (unless you have a leased line with the QoS trust angle negotiated in to the contract).
Click to expand...

When you have a roommate that likes to use Bittorrent a lot, traffic shaping comes in handy.
 
damicatz said:
When you have a roommate that likes to use Bittorrent a lot, traffic shaping comes in handy.
Click to expand...

Or multiple connections. It's also nice to be able to carve up your bandwidth the way you want.
 
You're forgetting a few important things:

1.) A full-fledged Linux router is a lot harder to setup than a consumer router.
2.) Consumer routers are a lot smaller than a spare box working as a linux router.
3.) Consumer routers have warranty support.

Both have their places.
 
Sod all these other points - are you telling me you get 4.5MBs from your service provider, or are you on a uni halls LAN?
 
Damn us brits are getting a raw deal - majority of ours 3MBs max (and that you pay through the nose for) a couple do 4 for silly money
 
mpeg4v3 said:
You're forgetting a few important things:

1.) A full-fledged Linux router is a lot harder to setup than a consumer router.
2.) Consumer routers are a lot smaller than a spare box working as a linux router.
3.) Consumer routers have warranty support.
Click to expand...

i disagree,
1.) Clark connect, smoothwall, m0n0wall, et. al. are just as easy to set up as a consumer router.
2.) i'll concede this is true, but the effect can be minimized.
3.) all of the parts that go into a linux router will have the same warranties that existed when they were desktop computers. sure they might have expired, but the longevity of the hardware speaks to robustness of the solution.

but there is a place for each.
 
BriguyNJ said:
i disagree,
1.) Clark connect, smoothwall, m0n0wall, et. al. are just as easy to set up as a consumer router.
2.) i'll concede this is true, but the effect can be minimized.
3.) all of the parts that go into a linux router will have the same warranties that existed when they were desktop computers. sure they might have expired, but the longevity of the hardware speaks to robustness of the solution.

but there is a place for each.
Click to expand...

Just buy a mini-ITX case and mobo!! :D

QJ
 
Darkstar850 said:
Now the rest of the stuff is cool and all, but I see people plugging this fairly frequently, and it doesn't really do anything. The traffic shaping is only going to allow you to throttle your own traffic, which is really a benefit mostly when you do not directly control all the machines on your network, so that you cannot throttle stuff like torrents at the desktop.
Click to expand...
Not quite true, but it took me a while to understand why this works as it does. By using the traffic shaping utilities, you control your queue.

What this does: If I have 10 packets all hit my box at once, I can arrange the order they go out of my network. So that voip packet and my ssh session get bumped to the front of the queue, while the web requests get dropped to the back. That way, when a queue fills up and heads out, the most important packets from that time period are going, and the lowest priority packets get shuffled to the next queue.

In practice, this works quite well. For example: I run a multi-site network, connected via openvpn. By their nature, the packets flowing across the vpn are the highest priority ( voip traffic ). Before I setup shaping, the people on the other end would experience cut outs when either side was under moderate traffic ( downloading a file from the web ). After shaping the interface, even under heavy loads there are no cut outs ( bittorrent, don't get worse than that ).

Packet shaping under linux is amazingly useful. Did you know you could transparently merge two interfaces? You can setup your rules to shuffle connections between them. Great for failover or simply balancing out the bandwidth
 
mpeg4v3 said:
You're forgetting a few important things:

1.) A full-fledged Linux router is a lot harder to setup than a consumer router.
2.) Consumer routers are a lot smaller than a spare box working as a linux router.
3.) Consumer routers have warranty support.

Both have their places.
Click to expand...

I'm not much of the SOHO junker advocate, but there are some advantages that would appeal to some; like less noise, power consumption, and heat.

I used IPCop on a 233MHz PII for two years until I was given a HotBrick Firewall VPN 800/2 (Like I said in previous posts, they're nice folks. hehe).
 
While everyone has there points, I think the major factors would be money and just plain personal preference. If you dont want to spend the money on a retail router and have a spare box lying around then YES a linux solution would probably be your best bet. But some people dont want to fool with the linux routers and just want something "simple" like a linksys retail router. And then you have those people that are just intimidated by the whole Linux OS thing.

I personally have had both types at my house. I too was running a Linksys WRT54G. It died on me 4 months later thanks to a power surge. I did not want to spend the money on a new one and I couldnt wait for Linksys to send me a new one. So, I set up a Linux router from an old PC I had lying around. I havent looked back since.

All in all it just comes down to personal preference! :)
 
qb4ever said:
I'm sold on running linux as a router except for one thing: do they have dynamic dns support?

eg: http://www.dyndns.com
Click to expand...

Yes. The configuration is done through the web based GUI (smoothwall, ipcop, clarkconnect and etc.) just like setting up something like dyndns.org's dynamic ip service on a consumer grade router. Before I got broadband I used this service on all three of aformentioned distros.
 
qb4ever said:
I'm sold on running linux as a router except for one thing: do they have dynamic dns support?

eg: http://www.dyndns.com
Click to expand...

Any devices that don't support that, you can easily run one of many free dyndns clients on a PC on your home LAN anyways, so a router or appliance that doesn't support dyndns is not a showstopper.
 
there's no way to build a linux router for as cheap as you can get a SOHO router. second, my connection comes in behind my TV and i'm not putting a computer there unless it's the one i already have there running windows and recording TV. thirdly, if i was going to build a router out of a computer i sure as hell wouldn't use linux. frankly i've been back and forth on this a lot. i've used ipcop and smoothwall before, and i've been running clarkconnect office here at work for the past 7 months. there is no discussion- BSD (free or open) with packetfilter is a better router/firewall. not only is the BSD tcp/ip stack the fastest in the world, but pf is just flat out better than iptables- simpler and more powerful.
 
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