Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router • Hacker News Board

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#131

Post by ShabbyDoo » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 4:23 PM UTC

JshWright wrote: post #75

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…

Buffalo ships a router with DD-WRT preinstalled. http://www.buffalotech.com/products/wireless/wireless-router... I'm using the 'stock' DD-WRT firmware on mine, and it handles its duty as a VPN endpoint, a Tunnelbroker endpoint, and does significant QoS'ing without a problem.

A good start. Does Buffalo offer any sort of SLA which promises timely firmware updates? What scares me about buying a router is that vendors silently stop supporting them. So, while grandma's grandson might have turned on automatic firmware updates, widely known security issues might not be patched after a year or two.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#132

Post by jaylevitt » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 7:41 PM UTC

nitid_name wrote: post #129

speleding wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QoS in your router is only interesting if bandwidth is constrained in your last mile, otherwise it just adds complexity. I would think that QoS in home routers is only a transitional technology for the next few years while not everyone has a large enough pipe yet. Can you imagine your electricity or water outlet at home being constrained like bandwidth is? Those issues were solved a century ago, they'll get fixed for…

I doubt water usage per capita has changed drastically in the last 20 years. Sure, there were drops from low flow toilets, low flow shower heads, and HE washing machines, and I'm sure there's some variability to usage based on seasonal variance from year to year, but the average US household uses about 350 gallons a day. I don't have access to historical data, but I'd wager that it hasn't changed more than 25% in the…

Of course you have access to historical data; you're on the Internet!

And you're right - it's estimated to have dropped 13-15% in the past 30 years.

http://www.awwa.org/files/Resources/Waterwiser/JAW0211rockaw...

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#133

Post by AncientPC » Tue, Jun 19, 2012, 10:49 PM UTC

jwr wrote: post #111

Just as a data point on the Tomato firmware. I've been running it for about 2 years now, on two different hardware devices. It hangs every once in a while, the intervals range from several days to several weeks. I determined the culprit is QoS: if I disable all QoS, the device will run fine for months. Enabling it shortens the uptime to days or weeks at most. Since I know this happens reproducibly on two different de…

Here's my data point to counter your data point.

I've been running Tomato and Tomato USB with QoS enabled for 4+ years. Routers were usually WRT54G or compatible Asus models installed into multiple homes or SOHO businesses. Tomato has been rock solid for me over that time period. Uptime was months or years depending on how often the router was moved or power went out.

However I have had a few issues with Tomato USB, which is a 3rd party fork. Switching back to original Tomato fixed my problems.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#134

Post by krakensden » Thu, Jun 21, 2012, 6:07 AM UTC

dtaht2 wrote: post #124

krakensden wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've done a bunch of work on reducing buffers and setting up AQM by default, and I've heard mumblings about improvements but can't find numbers. Closest thing I could find was this github repo: https://github.com/dtaht/deBloat/tree/master/test with lots of tests but no comparisons (stock OpenWRT vs ceroWRT would be interesting, for instance).

As for benchmarks, I have not taken the time to publish the results we currently get with fq_codel. However they are better in every respect than our previous attempt with sfqred and comparable to the qfq work we also did. It's not every day you go around seeing orders of magnitude improvements in anything... http://www.teklibre.com/~d/bloat/pfifo_fast_vs_sfq_qfq_log.p...

That is a sexy, sexy graph.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#135

Post by speleding » Thu, Jun 21, 2012, 1:54 PM UTC

nitid_name wrote: post #129

speleding wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QoS in your router is only interesting if bandwidth is constrained in your last mile, otherwise it just adds complexity. I would think that QoS in home routers is only a transitional technology for the next few years while not everyone has a large enough pipe yet. Can you imagine your electricity or water outlet at home being constrained like bandwidth is? Those issues were solved a century ago, they'll get fixed for…

I doubt water usage per capita has changed drastically in the last 20 years. Sure, there were drops from low flow toilets, low flow shower heads, and HE washing machines, and I'm sure there's some variability to usage based on seasonal variance from year to year, but the average US household uses about 350 gallons a day. I don't have access to historical data, but I'd wager that it hasn't changed more than 25% in the…

Your comparing the last few decades of internet use with the last few decades of water use, a fairer comparison would be the first few decades of water use with the the first few decades of internet use.

More relevant to the point though, would be to compare it with the growth in internet usage a decade or two from now: as technologies mature it would would seem reasonable to expect that the growth tails off and QoS on the internet last mile will become just as useful as QoS on water pipes.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#136

Post by ZoFreX » Fri, Jun 22, 2012, 8:56 AM UTC

zalew wrote: post #113

ZoFreX wrote: post #107

I'm done with routers. Totally fed up of them running out of RAM, taking too long to open new connections, not being able to open more connections if someone is using 200 to torrent, fed up of them forgetting static IP assignments, port forwards, upnp never working... I got fed up of all that and decided to do something about it. Routers have 8, 16mb of RAM? My worst computer that's lying around has 256mb. Slap anoth…

and how much power does it consume and how much noise it produces?

Power consumption isn't great compared to a dedicated router, obviously. Noise wasn't a problem - old hardware doesn't put out much heat, so cooling it with fans is easily do-able at very low noise levels.

A future project I have in mind is to do the same thing but with ultra low power components, e.g. Intel Atom or something along those lines. I aim to get under 10W draw from the wall.

Re: Because Everyone (Still) Needs a Router

#137

Post by riobard » Sat, Jun 23, 2012, 1:26 PM UTC

zobzu wrote: post #100

riobard wrote: post #97

Can anyone familiar with DD-wrt/OpenWrt/Tomato comment with their relative merits against each other?

dd-wrt is simple and has a good ui but not really open/no real tinkering possible etc openwrt is very open and community-like (with actual VCS, package building scripts, package manager, and so on), easy to tinker and so on. But there's no neat and simple UI. Command line or uhm, "half decent UIs that u have to install and setup" tomato has a very good UI, is open source, but isn't really all that easy to tinker with…

Thanks!

Does the support of devices (e.g. different chips) affect the choice of which one to use?