what would better for home routing?

[zogg]

A converted 486 or pentium with two 10/100 base nics or a broadband router form linksys or netgear or one of the other broadband routers available. I need to share my cable connection with my lan for file and webserver and game server purposes.
which wouyld be faster a pentium ( or 486) or the storebought router?
wouldnt a say.... 75 pentium have more processing power then a chip in a router?

 

[Wik]

I would go with the 486 solution. I have a Netgear RT311 which I love and works great, but it and most others out there are limited in the port forwarding department. So it works good going out to the net but makes things limited for serving webs and games.

I just dug out one of my old computers, took out the hard drive, put in a floppy, 2 NICs and a old video card and made a Freesco floppy router for it. Cost to me was the $20 I paid total for two cheetah (SMC/Realtec) NICS. I had it up and running in under an hour and I now have a router full of features compared to the big dollar Cisco Systems. I get better ping times with 2 computers on Game Spy playing Counter-Strike and I can forward any port to any computer. The speed of the system is just as fast if you were connected direct to the cable modem.

So if you have an old 486 with about 6-16 megs ram I would just use it. It works alot better. You do not need to know how to use Linux and it is very stable. It would also save you over $100 in cost and you have lots of features. Check out Freesco at www.Freesco.com. I think it is the best way to share your internet.

 

[zeroabYss]

Only thing I could think of that would slow you down is the PCI bus on the older motherboards -- but I have not done or seen any testing to show significant loss-- merely thinking aloud

Goodluck

 

[zogg]

Ok, so its one of these old 486's I found in the garbage at my local bank...Thanks D_me Savings Bank!
You say I dont need to know linux at all? How would I learn the commands to forward ports or what ever I would have to do to get this going properly?

 

[BCYL]

Freesco is very user-friendly.... You can figure what to do with minimal Linux knowledge... The things you don't know you can find out doing a simple search on the web...

Other alternatives to Freesco are Coyote Linux and Linux Router/

 

[Wik]

I mean it is very simple to use. All the information you need to use Freesco is at www.freesco.com. You can turn on a feature to access the router from a web browser of a client machine inside your network. There you find a great menu to forward ports from, as simple as hitting the add button then you select what kind of port, the port number, the IP address of the client machine to receive it, and the port number of the client machine.

My old 166 does the job great and I am going to change over to some old 486 parts I have. This is much better then my Netgear RT311 Cable/DSL router. The only commands you need to know is reboot, and the login:root and password:root. Give it a try. Once you get it running you will not be disappointed in it's features. You can also use it as a print server, or through in a modem and provide a 56k internet connection to a friend who can dial into your router.

Trust me you don't have to know how to use Linux. I don't. I installed Red Hat 6.2 last week and messed around enough with it on root to mess up the install.

 

[rigor2]

suggestion: Get a 486 board with pci slots. isa is more of a pain to setup.

also make sure your nics are support by FREESCO or whatever it is.

I just installed redhat 7 onto a crappy one gig, and slapped in the default NAT rc.firewall and boom. if you want the firewall config that works great for me, email me.

 

[Wik]

Yes the PCI slots makes things alot easier. Even if freesco does not have built in support for your NICs, all you have to do is put in the unix/linux driver for your cards into the driver folder. I had to this for mine and it worked great.

 

[BCYL]

I agree... if you have not purchased ur NICs yet, buy ones that are supported on the Freesco website (or whatever linux router solution u are using)... I had one of those cheap NICs @Home gave me, and it was a pain to get it working with Coyote Linux... I couldn't get it working at all on Freesco...