MSI Micro ATX board with Athlon II processor w/ 4 PCI slots (or 2 PCI
and 2 PCIE)
2 GB RAM
4 gigabit NIC cards
IDE or SATA to Compact Flash Adaptor
Compact flash 2GB memory - install Linux or Router based distro on CF
card or USB memory stick
External power 120v to 12v transformer w/ mono power converter
Small micro case
Set BIOS to boot CF Card or USB Memory stick
Ubuntu 10.04 or 12.04 LTS server minimum install
- Install Openssh
- Firewall
- OpenVPN
- iptables
Basically you are building an edge router/vpnserver. There are a lot of
instructions to build a high end router/openvpn system using a minimum
box configuration. The mobo chip and RAM maybe overkill but smaller
ATOM based boards probably won't have 4 PCI slots. you should be able
to pick up these for very reasonable cost compared to a higher end
router. Do you need all 4 - 1 gigabit connections to the router or can
the connections to the VPN be shared off of one or two NICs? OpenVPN
needs a minimum of 2 NIC's (Unless you have set up virtual network
adaptors and bridged them together). Are you dedicating each user to a
NIC for speed? If not you could allocate the 4 users to a NIC and
connect the router/vpnserver to a 4 port gigabit switch.
I'm sure there are a number of the ways to do this and there even might
be fairly high end router for a good deal but most will also have built
in wireless as well. to find a dedicated wired only higher end router
you may pay as much as the system I just outlined and it would be no
where near the capabilities of the above system unless it was a lot more
expensive.
I'm sure that there are others here with a lot more experience with
consumer and enterprise level equipment then myself but I have had
success with the above. Also keep in mind that the Athlon II is 64bit
with SVM built in for virtualization. With additional memory you could
run the whole thing virtualized using KVM or VMware.
Good Luck!
On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 7:53 PM, Mark Phillips
<
mark@phillipsmarketing.biz <mailto:
mark@phillipsmarketing.biz>> wrote:
I am looking for a router with the following characteristics:
* No wifi
* 4 gigabit LAN ports
* 1 WAN port to connect to my Cox Cable Modem
* 400 MHZ+ processor so I can run OpenVPN SSL for a max of 4 remote
users to access the LAN at the same time.
The last point comes from reading various forums about running
openvpn on the router, and they all say get the fastest possible
cpu. I probably have to run dd-wrt on the router to get openvpn
running on the router, but I am open to other options (most of the
open source router packages support openvpn, so anyone will do).
Thanks!
Mark
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