OS to use comp as a router

A

amazon3d

Limp Gawd
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Oct 19, 2007
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Hello everyone I wanted to find out what OS/package to use to turn a box I have into a router, I have 5 GBE cards in it and would like to use it to sort zones( Student/Staff/Admin).
I know Linux is most likely the only one going to do it but what package/distro should I be using?
 
Should've ventured over to the Networking & Security subforum and browsed the sticky. It might pertain to your application.

Build-Your-Own Router?
For those more technically inclined who want the most performance possible without going to a full commercial/business product, you may want to look into the many freely available Linux and BSD based firewall solutions out there. Some of the well known ones include: Smoothwall, Untangle, Endian, IPCop, pfSense and m0n0wall.

Building your own router using one of the aforementioned solutions requires an older PC, a few spare network cards, some time and a bit of elbow grease. They all have different things to offer so be sure to read up on them all before making a decision. Smoothwall, Endian and IPCop are probably the most well known and thus (generally) offer the best community support for bugs and such. Your mileage may vary. A note on system requirements: While many firewall/router distributions out there will work with anything down to a 386, you should look for a system in the 500-900Mhz range with 128-512MB of RAM. DO NOT use an uber system for a router - it's unnecessary in most environments in our scope and will be grossly underutilized.

Please note that most of these "build your own" solutions will require a separate wireless access point if you want wireless capabilities. A WRT54G (Pre-v5) or Buffalo product with DD-WRT works great in this respect.
Click to expand...
 
I think that "build your own router" advice is for replacing a dsl/cable router which is somewhat different than a 5x gigabit router.

To start with i think you'd need beefier hardware - 1 or 2x gigabit is close to saturating pci bus, you may have to look into PCI express for more bandwidth.
 
How likely are you to push 5-gigabit on that router?

I have a VM for my firewall running pfSense, which is FreeBSD 7.0, and pushing 65+ megabit through NAT uses about 1.9 ghz on one core of a core2quad q6600. Most of the processing is for the actual interrupt of the packets. PCI Express will help, but 5-gigabit is a lot of traffic for a PC to handle.
 
ambientZ said:
I think that "build your own router" advice is for replacing a dsl/cable router which is somewhat different than a 5x gigabit router.

To start with i think you'd need beefier hardware - 1 or 2x gigabit is close to saturating pci bus, you may have to look into PCI express for more bandwidth.
Click to expand...

If you take a look in the N&S subforum you'll see that it's more than just a replacement for home grade routers. A lot of people (myself included) run Small to Medium businesses off of UTM (untangle seems to be the favorite) boxes.

It's a router, i highly doubt that they'll be pumping that much bandwidth through it.... thats what switches are for.
 
I doubt I will be pushing more then 300mbps threw it but I have 10/100/1000 cards. The box is more or less to keep the networks from being able to access each other (exception to admin network) and be able to monitor/block traffic on the rest of the network.
 
It all depends what you want to do and level of your expertise. If you want to build exactly what you want, you are better off using OpenBSD. Not all xBSDs are the same. I know some people will say otherwise. OpenBSD is known for the highest level of security. If you want something that just works with a very low resource, you can use the pre-made firewall/router such as IpCOP. Ipcop is a community based firewall and it is very active.
 
I think I'm going to try IpCOP as I have heard of it but never tried it. I used smoothwall for a bit but it was becoming troublesome for M$ updates. I later found out it was a port being blocked. Perhaps IpCOP will have a better run for me, Thanks.
 
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