Hello, I am looking for a mini-router that can handle a fair dataflow. I have looked at Soekris, WRAP, Routerboards, etc but they just don't seem to have great throughput.
I am putting up some 802.11b/g for client access with 802.11a for backhaul. For some sites I do not need routers do to the fact that it is a simple .11b/g .11a setups. However, somesites will have multiple .11a links for multiple hops and/or fail-over links.
CISCO is too much money for multiple sites, so I am trying to find some other router for this task and I am wondering what other people are using for a problem like this.
Realize that most of these boards are just 486 or ARM 7/9 processors. They're made for low power, no fans, but not speed. For example:
formatting link
On a net4501, m0n0wall provides a WAN LAN TCP throughput of about 17 Mbps, including NAT, when run with the default configuration. On faster platforms (like net4801 or WRAP), throughput in excess of 50 Mbps is possible (and > 100 Mbps with newer standard PCs).
One of my home made Freesco router, with an ugly ruleset for packet filtering, runs at about 50Mbits/sec peak thruput. That's running with five 100baseTX-HDX Intel Pro100 ethernet cards on a PIII/733 with
128MB ram and a 256MB CF card for a hard disk. I've never measure average, which I'll guess(tm) will be approx 30Mbits/sec. I've never checked what happens when I simultaneously load more than one interface.
Can I ask you for some numbers? How many MegaBloats per second were you expecting? Peak and average please. The most you'll get out of
54Mbit/sec 802.11a is 25Mbits/sec thrupout, so anything faster should be acceptable.
You probably also don't need a router at the sites with multiple ports because a local switch will insure that only the traffic destined to a specific remote client will go via the connecting radio. Only broadcasts will go everywhere. However, if you want to isolate clients from each other, and do a RIP2 based fail-over, a router will be necessary.
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