Trying to Find a Router

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Jonjolt

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 6, 2002
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I've got Verizon Fios 15/2mbps I hate the router that came with it, I heard of some people useing linksys for example and still getting full speed, I can't seem to find a router that fits my needs:
-Gotta be rackmountable
-Support 15mps through the WAN
-Costs less than $1000
-Also has to support DSL (Fios still uses PPPoE)

Is this realistic or should I be looking around in a higher price range?
 
I would look into using Linux using a Mini-ITX board. They make a small 1U case for them. You could build a really beefy system for about $500.

Edit: I might be little off on the price, but I'm sure you could do it for under $1000.
 
I don't know man, under a Grand for something that handles that speed might be hard to do without Ebay/Auctions. I just took a look at ImageStream (Linux based routers), and there Rebel Router (1U router) costs about 2000. There cheaper Transport line can only do T1 speeds (1.5mbps IIRC) and costs 900 (also, not in a rackmount case). The transport actually uses a Via MiniITX.

Like mentioned above me, you could look at building your own, possibly using a rack mount case. With a decent CPU you might get that performance. Might want to look into Carrier Grade Linux though. Essentially I think its just patches in the kernel to help speed up packet switching and routing decisions, but I don't know too much about it, don't forget to read my sig.

EDIT: Link to CGL
http://www.osdl.org/lab_activities/carrier_grade_linux/
 
Cisco 871, it's not rack mountable, but should do the job for under a grand and they can be had in a wireless version if you need it. They can also be ordered with advanced security (IPS) or advanced IP services (QoS) and come with IPsec VPN support for use with the Cisco VPN client, site-to-site VPNs, etc.

Also, any low end Cisco router should do the trick (2600, 2801, etc.) but with your budget Ebay is about the only place you will find one of those for that price...
 
Juniper 5 gt can do what you are asking. Its not rackmountable but sits very nicely on a rack mount shelf.
 
Under a grand you say? :)
The Cisco 2651 will do what you need!

1U rackmount and the nice cisco green color.

The routing performance is 18.94Mbps according to the cisco router performance sheet. (the lower end 262x and 261x do 12.8 and 7.68 respectively)

It has two fast ethernet ports, so you can do WAN and LAN.

You can find one for ~$500 and under on ebay.

Any recent version of the IOS will be able to do PPPoE (I believe 12.3 and higher)

You could also do a whole bunch of other things, QoS and VPN, and some other advanced features if you have a nice IOS feature pack.
 
why does a wrt54g not work? i thought the wan port was a 10/100. if it was me, i'd probably but together a system to do the job with one of those fully integrated via motherboards and use a compactflash card as the os drive (for size reasons - this system could be extremely small). you could probably get what you need for between $100 and $200
 
Ok, let me put it this way, just because it has a 10/100 connection, doesn't mean it can route the packets fast enough to actually reach that speed. That and most consumer level "routers" aren't made to do any thing more then NAT. Under good presure they will buckle, quickly I might add. The WRT54G isn't bad though, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't use it in this case, even with customized firmware.
 
Xipher said:
Ok, let me put it this way, just because it has a 10/100 connection, doesn't mean it can route the packets fast enough to actually reach that speed. That and most consumer level "routers" aren't made to do any thing more then NAT. Under good presure they will buckle, quickly I might add. The WRT54G isn't bad though, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't use it in this case, even with customized firmware.
Click to expand...

i wasn't sure if the inability to route packets fast enough was a hardware limitation or a software one. i figured if it was a question of optimizing the code, perhaps one of the custom firmwares could do it. does he lose anything by going with a 1u via epia system vs. the more expensive routers on the market?
 
Actually, its likely both. Depending on the interconnect between the interfaces, it might not physicly be able to push packets threw fast enough. Look at the averge computer just a year or so ago, and even today. The NIC is connected via the PCI bus, which in consumer machines is normally running at just 33MHz, and doesn't have that much bandwidth. It doesn't really matter how fast the processor making the decisions is, you will probably end up saturating the PCI bus before you saturate the Memory or CPU. That and the hard disk controlers run off the same PCI bus, so when ever any form of disk writes occure (normally this is cached to save speed) it will sap that little bit of bandwidth from the packets for the time it takes to do the write. Thing is now with PCI-X and PCI-Express NICs coming out, the bus is catching up on consumer machines. I don't know exactly what the consumer NAT Routers use though, might be something else, might be PCI, I don't know for sure.

EDIT: Did a quick search, found a page that seems to have some nice information
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/buses/funcBandwidth-c.html
 
the page says that the pci bus is capable of about 130Mbyte/s. don't forget that 100mbps ethernet is megaBITS per second, so even at it's theoretical maximum, it's only using 12.5Mbyte/s. it's really gigabit ethernet that pushes the pci bus. that said, this guy's connection is only 15mbit downstream, so he's not using close to what the 100 spec maxes out at. a 15mbit connection maxes at 1.875Mbyte, which i thought would be acceptable for a linksys router. it would certainly cause no bandwidth issues with a via epia.

even if you were to figure that in a multihomed box:
wan nic: 1.875Mbyte/s
lan nic: 12.5Mbyte/s
hd: 100Mbyte/s (which no hard drive can really reach)

you're still easily within the pci bus spec
 
Ok just to clarify a few things with some people this is why I need a better router...
-I'm switching all my computers to rackmount and I want something that I can mount to it (its gonna get really crouded with my main system, file server, SAS expander, hot swap box, gigabit switch, several other systems etc)
-The current Dlink gets knocked out from to many connections
-It also bogs down alot

I just got a Cisco 3640 with 128ram and 32flash with latest IOS for about $400.
 
dualblade said:
the page says that the pci bus is capable of about 130Mbyte/s. don't forget that 100mbps ethernet is megaBITS per second, so even at it's theoretical maximum, it's only using 12.5Mbyte/s. it's really gigabit ethernet that pushes the pci bus. that said, this guy's connection is only 15mbit downstream, so he's not using close to what the 100 spec maxes out at. a 15mbit connection maxes at 1.875Mbyte, which i thought would be acceptable for a linksys router. it would certainly cause no bandwidth issues with a via epia.

even if you were to figure that in a multihomed box:
wan nic: 1.875Mbyte/s
lan nic: 12.5Mbyte/s
hd: 100Mbyte/s (which no hard drive can really reach)

you're still easily within the pci bus spec
Click to expand...
Are you forgeting all the other communication that goes on over the PCI bus? You have hard disk (swap, logging, etc), video/display. And don't forget, the packets have to be routed into memory, processed by the kernel, and then copied back. There is overhead as well. That 130MB is theoretical maximum, not constant throughput. I'm not saying a PC couldn't handle this, I'm saying I don't know if a embeded device like the consumer NAT boxes (WRT54G, etc) can.

Jonjolt said:
I just got a Cisco 3640 with 128ram and 32flash with latest IOS for about $400.
Click to expand...
Sounds like a nice find man, hope that works well for ya. :D If you would actually, let us know how it works out.
 
The Cisco 3640 is quite a beefy router :) 2U of rackmount madness!

I hope you got two FastEthernet modules with that thing!
 
For a reference, at lans, we have a linksys (befsr41) wired router on a college network with a ds3 feeding it (I think), getting 20mbit/s throughput is never a problem, never slows down.

That is, until someone start downloading newsgroups thinking they are cool getting 2 mbytes/s. And even then, it works fine.

So needing something ultra-high end cisco isnt necessarily needed, but it works.

But as I didnt read fully, you got a cisco 3600 series (good find). :)
 
I have 3 of those linksys, for me they never worked even with my old slow dsl, they would last about 2 weeks before the whole thing had to be completely restarted. 1 of them bit dust after some heavy downloading. :(
 
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