Looking for Router Suggestions

[James Dugger]

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 at 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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-- 
James
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