Speccing a router

[MadAd]

Routers are one area of my knowledge that I have a gaping hole at.

I dont mean learning what QoS, NAT or uPnP are, Im fine there, but how do I spec a router to my needs? I am finding it hard to get data on them that makes sense to my limited knowledge.

I've been using windows boxes with connection sharing for some years, since Win98, and its served me well, but now I'm starting to load the box heavily and networking is suffering and even failing, which I need to stop. I upgraded it to a 2.4ghz x2 on an m2n with dual gig E but its still awful.

Its just right now, im starting to run small servers, atm its currently 20 ports with services on pretty much 24/7 that must stay connected for 2 or 3 weeks at a time. Their collective bandwidth is consistently 1mb down, 200k up and I aim to grow that to 50-60 ports at least.

Plus I want to use bittorrent at least a bit - the pc used to handle 300 bt connections through a single port pair (udp/tcp) without load but now ive crashed the M2N box twice downloading updates I just cant risk losing these services. They are only making me a few dollars after costs, not enough to spend huge figures on enterprise kit, yet I'm worried that moving to a residential class cable router is going to end in tears.

So I have to have a router but how to chose?!? All i need is Qos and stability, I dont need VPN or wireless of any kind (it'll just be disabled). I looked on the linksys site, theres no mention of connections or any helpful technical spec to purchase by.



Someone gave me a WRT54G V2.2 but after a long trawl i found mention it only managed about 90 connections so im afraid to use that, but thats old now. Surely things have changed?

And are 300 bittorrent connections really connections in the same sense throught one port? It certainly gives the serving PC fits, I can almost hear it groan as the ICS gobbles up the cpu cycles. So do I just add up what i know I need and buy to that? eg about 400 connections for bt, my services and some overhead?? or is that not the right way of thinking?

Thanks a lot to any of you that can reveal the hardware mystery a little more.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Building a small machine will and using things like GNU Zebra or other routing software can give you infinite power handling abilities. A small AMD dual core, a gig of memory, an 80GB boot drive would give you all you need. Then you can use things like RAID cards for storage etc. Whatever you need it to do.

 

[MadAd]

Thanks for the reply, yeah I have a couple of p4 boxes that I could use if i wanted to carry on that route but the savings in power costs could contribute towards a half decent router.

That is, if I can ever figure out how to spec the damn things to get one that suits my usage pattern.

 

[vorgusa]

Not sure if there is a reason why you would pick GNU Zebra but it seems like they have not worked on that project since 2005. Try looking at smoothwall, Clarkconnect, and pfsense those are always being updated and have tons of extra feature that make it even more useful

 

[MadAd]

Hey guys this is Anandtech, am I asking the wrong question? Or does no-one really know what gos on inside these little boxes?

I mean we buy cpus in mhz, memory in gbs, routers in connections?

 

[ScottFern]

www.smallnetbuilder.com "Router Performance Chart" http://www.smallnetbuilder.com...,com_chart/Itemid,189/

 

[vorgusa]

Routers have specialized processors that are optimized to work for networking situations. You can not compare them to computers. It is even difficult to compare two computers by Ghz since a new generation 3.0 Ghz processor Intel processor works a lot faster then a 3.0 Ghz P4. If you are looking to compare PC computer to PC computer then you mainly need to look at what software you are using. If you use a linux distro you will be able to have more people on a similar PC then a Windows, since windows has a lot more going on that has nothing to do with routing. You will probably get more features that deal with networking too. Even amoung linux disrtibutions there are different amounts of features that can slow down the total speed and then you have to consider what settings and the number of firewall rules you have.. there is no real answer, but you can probably get close by just looking at some of the sites that deal with the software.

 

[MadAd]

Fantastic ScottFern, thank you, been reading for hours. Looks like I'm off to get a D-Link DIR-655. 200 connections will do I guess, 100 for bt, 100 for the rest.

Life could be worse.

 

[MadAd]

OTOH life could be much better with a Draytek 2930.

60 meg throughput, 20000 concurrent connections, it doesn't miss a beat!

So much better than a 655, I would have run out of 200 connections real fast.

 

[JackMDS]

The chart that is linked above ended up to being one of the most deceiving charts available for End-Users.

More than 95% of End-Users have an Internet connection with a bandwidth bellow 10 Mb/sec.

This is just a WAN LAN chart. These results are meaningful if you are using the Router between segments of 100Mb/sec. private LAN and Not between the typical Internet connection and LAN.

 

[NickOlsen8390]

I would recommend Mikrotik if you know your networking. Its easy to setup and will do anything. I have my main router running it. It has a 2.6ghz P4 and 1 gb of ram. I too run servers and move Hundreds of GB a month. the router uses about 30mb of the 1gb of ram, and about 10% of the P4 at peak, and were talking 50,000 connections. I love it, I have never had to reboot it or anything. As long as the computer is stable it works great. there is a free version of the software that will do everything a normal router will do, but if you want more, such as great QOS, (well more then 1 QOS entry) you will need to buy the L4 license, which is 45 dollars USD. And in my opinion its the best 45 you could spend. If you have the computer thats all you pay. Just need a computer with 2 ethernet interfaces, I'm using the onboard 10/100 as the WAN and a gigabit interface i had laying around as the LAN side. Can also be used for limiting bandwidth on the networking. In a nutshell It can do everything, Including BGP routing and OSPF.


This is a screenshot of the management program. Didn't bring up the firewall connection sheet for security purposes (shows hundreds of ip's including mine) But when i took this there were about 10,000 connections active.
Here