mini DIY routers

[soccermomisqueen]

Has anyone tried to use the DIY routers that you can find off of amazon (they have 4 or 5 Ethernet ports and run off of a celeron processor typically)? I am looking at acquiring one and putting Linux on it to act as my router for my home (I am getting sick and tired of maintaining my ISP router that keeps crapping out on me. For 5 years they have given me good ones, but the last 2 have given me nothing but headaches).

 

if they turn out to be crap, I am just going to go acquire an old Dell R710 or R720 and put a boatload of Ethernet cards in it to use. If it turns out to be better, then I may go the server route instead since I already have a server rack  and networking switch XD

[Alex Atkin UK]

11 minutes ago, soccermomisqueen said:

Has anyone tried to use the DIY routers that you can find off of amazon (they have 4 or 5 Ethernet ports and run off of a celeron processor typically)? I am looking at acquiring one and putting Linux on it to act as my router for my home (I am getting sick and tired of maintaining my ISP router that keeps crapping out on me. For 5 years they have given me good ones, but the last 2 have given me nothing but headaches).

 

if they turn out to be crap, I am just going to go acquire an old Dell R710 or R720 and put a boatload of Ethernet cards in it to use. If it turns out to be better, then I may go the server route instead since I already have a server rack  and networking switch XD

Plenty of us do, but they're cheaper on Aliexpress and I wouldn't recommend the Celerons.  The N100 based units are insane value for money and will sip power compared to an old Dell.

[Levent]

I got myself a N6000 barebones unit for $120 shipped. One of the best computer expenses I had in a long time.

[OhioYJ]

You don't necessarily need a bunch of Ethernet cards. You can use  switches. I'm using a NUC that has a dual NIC, then using switches for everything else.

[soccermomisqueen]

12 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Plenty of us do, but they're cheaper on Aliexpress and I wouldn't recommend the Celerons.  The N100 based units are insane value for money and will sip power compared to an old Dell.

yeah. I am just worried about performance in some situations since I have about 30 machines on the LAN and a few servers that are public facing. Not too worried about power since I get power cheap as dirt where I live. Worst comes to worst if I get a Dell, I can have a few extra things running on the server

I will definitely look at Ali express for something that has an upgradeable SSD (I will put a nice drive into it) and hopefully it will get to my home in time for me to not throw my old router out the window.

[soccermomisqueen]

20 minutes ago, Levent said:

I got myself a N6000 barebones unit for $120 shipped. One of the best computer expenses I had in a long time.

I will definitely look into this since it seems viable (prices to look like they have gone up though ).

[soccermomisqueen]

18 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

You don't necessarily need a bunch of Ethernet cards. You can use  switches. I'm using a NUC that has a dual NIC, then using switches for everything else.

I was thinking about the Ethernet cards since I could do network segmentation and install an SFP card in the future if I had wanted (especially since enterprises are getting rid of their old ones for cheap).

[jaslion]

28 minutes ago, soccermomisqueen said:

yeah. I am just worried about performance in some situations since I have about 30 machines on the LAN and a few servers that are public facing. Not too worried about power since I get power cheap as dirt where I live. Worst comes to worst if I get a Dell, I can have a few extra things running on the server

I will definitely look at Ali express for something that has an upgradeable SSD (I will put a nice drive into it) and hopefully it will get to my home in time for me to not throw my old router out the window.

routers are simple and basic machines. 30 users is nothing for a n100

[OhioYJ]

1 hour ago, soccermomisqueen said:

I was thinking about the Ethernet cards since I could do network segmentation and install an SFP card in the future if I had wanted (especially since enterprises are getting rid of their old ones for cheap).

You can still do this with VLANs if you want. This does require managed switches though. This is how my network is setup. 

 

Just throwing out options. 

[soccermomisqueen]

7 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

You can still do this with VLANs if you want. This does require managed switches though. This is how my network is setup. 

 

Just throwing out options. 

I am sort of looking at multiple cards since it would be especially nice to have my servers on their own port since they have been hit with over 2 requests per second for web traffic and averaging about 750KB per request (I was hammered one weekend with about 150k requests).

 

AKA: if my serves get a lot of requests, it would be nice to have it on its own port so there is a chance it does not affect the rest of my home

[Alex Atkin UK]

4 hours ago, soccermomisqueen said:

I am sort of looking at multiple cards since it would be especially nice to have my servers on their own port since they have been hit with over 2 requests per second for web traffic and averaging about 750KB per request (I was hammered one weekend with about 150k requests).

 

AKA: if my serves get a lot of requests, it would be nice to have it on its own port so there is a chance it does not affect the rest of my home

Its going to make zero difference as the bottleneck for active connections will be at the CPU anyway and your WAN port is still dealing with all the traffic on a single port, so spreading it at the router is not changing the load.

 

One thing with the appliances as well is the newer NICs are designed fore multi-core use, so you get a 4 core CPU matched with a NIC that has 4 traffic queues.  Not sure how much difference it makes in the real world, but in theory its more efficient as a single NICs traffic is not single core bottlenecked.