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Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

codinghorror.com

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Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#41

Post by jtreminio »

dustinupdyke wrote: post #29
jtreminio wrote: post #21

One thing Jeff didn't mention is that due to the high CPU and RAM in that ASUS router, you can be downloading several different torrents and the internet experience in general won't be degraded. With my Verizon FIOS's router, if I try to torrent anything it gets throttled down to less than 10KB/s, and on my old Linksys, attempting to torrent would make browsing the internet nearly impossible.

Curious if it is possible to take the FIOS router out of the equation entirely?

The router also hooks up into my TV, so not sure if possible in my situation. However, the FIOS router is exceedingly horrible - the wifi signal is very poor, and I almost never get the rated speeds using it.

What I've ended up doing is hooking up the ASUS router via LAN to the FIOS router and connecting all my devices to the ASUS. Every single complain is fixed going this route.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#42

Post by travisp »

dustinupdyke wrote: post #29
jtreminio wrote: post #21

One thing Jeff didn't mention is that due to the high CPU and RAM in that ASUS router, you can be downloading several different torrents and the internet experience in general won't be degraded. With my Verizon FIOS's router, if I try to torrent anything it gets throttled down to less than 10KB/s, and on my old Linksys, attempting to torrent would make browsing the internet nearly impossible.

Curious if it is possible to take the FIOS router out of the equation entirely?

Not if you have FiOS TV and want access to On Demand and similar features. The router connects up to the TV and not through a network cable. However, I've had no issues getting exactly the 50/20 speeds I signed up for with their router.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#45

Post by makomk »

TheGateKeeper wrote: post #40
nodata wrote: post #36

Tomato isn't exactly open source, it's more a mixture of Linux (kernel), freeware and a proprietary frontend.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that. I say the best tool for the job at hand is what wins, especially over ideologies.

Unfortunately, third-party router firmware distributors have an annoying habit of going from free-as-in-beer to having obnoxious and expensive licensing conditions. Which is of course one of the reasons why the open source ideology is popular in the first place!

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#46

Post by wut42 »

In France, this need have been killed by the ISP themself. Is there any ISP in the US who does that ?

Free (a ISP) started in 2002. It's a home-made modem router, who also does TV and Phone. Since that almost all others French ISP have created their *box (Livebox, BBox, AliceBox, Neufbox, …).

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#47

Post by tnorthcutt »

dugmartin wrote: post #5

As I commented here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4082351 The part of Tomato I like best is its simple DNS interface that lets you have one hosts file that is shared across all the machines connected to it. This is where I define my local dev domains so that I can test across devices that don't allow local host file changes (namely non-jailbroken iOS devices).

Whoa, that's pretty awesome. Does anyone know if DD-WRT can do this as well?

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#48

Post by ragmondo »

Draytek Vigor. My go to router of choice. built in vpn from the off, so you can drop in these bad boys and then (once set up) auto route all your traffic that looks as if it should go to the remote site TO the remote site. Easy to vpn back "home" if you are out and about. QOS built in. VOIP server built in to the higher version. They are as cheap as a typical router but they pack the punch of any router out there. ... unless someone can tell me why not ?

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#49

Post by ew »

nodata wrote: post #37
ShabbyDoo wrote: post #17

I posted this "Ask HN" awhile back about my desire to pay for a router-as-a-service: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1160585 What surprised me was the number of responses along the lines of "you don't need this -- just install DD-WRT, OpenWRT, whatever and configure the foo,bar, and baz features as such." I'm likely in the 99th percentile of the US population in my ability to do such a thing, and I still have to…

Doesn't Meraki do what you asked for?

Meraki is severely over priced and focused on enterprise users. They are not a consumer product.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#50

Post by dbarlett »

freehunter wrote: post #9
citricsquid wrote: post #6

Maybe this is a reasonable place to ask for some advice: I have 2 broadband connections, one via my phone line (ADSL) (76/17) and one cable (50/4) does anyone have any experience with using 1 piece of hardware to manage them both, possibly load balancing (not important, but would be cool)? I currently have 1 modem and 2 routers... it's not a very power efficient set up, it's also a bad experience because they're all…

Realistically, you'd be looking at a soho (small office/home office) load balancing router, specifically a dual-wan router. Cisco offers some [1] as well as Peplink [2]. I don't have a lot of experience with them (did some research on it a few years ago but never pulled the trigger), so YMMV when it comes to custom firmware etc. Doing a google search on "dual wan router" would give you a good feel for the environment…

If you don't want to mess with iptables, ClearOS (CentOS derivative) [1] has built-in multi-WAN support [2], including auto-failover and load balancing. There's a GUI, but you can always SSH in and configure things manually.

My home router/server is a MicroATX box with an Atom D525, 4GB RAM, 2 x 1TB RAID-1, and 2 x Gigabit NIC. Cost a few hundred dollars to build, draws ~16W idle, and is almost silent. DNS, SSH, FTP, SMB, POP/IMAP, SMTP, QoS, PPTP/OpenVPN/IPsec, and dmcrypt are included. The Atom chip is fine for home use, move up to an Athlon if you're pushing a lot of SSH traffic.

[1] http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/overview.html [2] http://www.clearcenter.com/support/documentation/clearos_ent...

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