Looking for Router Suggestions

[Eric Shubert]

I run IPCop as a VM (presently VMware, soon to be KVM).

IPCop has everything you're looking for in a prebuilt distro. Any ol' 
PentiumIII or greater should do, with 2 nics. IPCop provides all of the 
network services you'll likely ever need, and then some.

You really only need 2 nics (WAN/LAN) on the firewall. I think it'd be 
more appropriate (easier, cheaper) to add another GigE switch to what 
you have. They can be chained together of course.

On 07/05/2012 11:10 PM, James Dugger wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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
>
>
>
>


-- 
-Eric 'shubes'