4. Please help with hardware selection

Please help with hardware selection

  • H

    Hi everyone,

    I am finally at my wits' end with this Linksys WRT1200ac v2 DD-WRT. I am currently running 3x servers for business reasons in my house. Here are the details of the data I'm using on my network:

    5,000-30,000 simultaneous connections.
    100mbps or more almost 24/7.

    I currently have a business-class Internet plan that's 150mbps and unlimited data, but I'm going to upgrade to 1 gigbit likely, because my Internet and my router are clearly a huge bottleneck now. The 3 servers I have are very very good machines and they could handle a lot more than I'm giving them at the moment.

    The problem with my router is that it keeps crashing. Even though I've lowered the TIME_WAIT timeout to decrease the active open connections a lot, when it has to handle 100mbps constantly, it crashes after X minutes / hours. It seems really random. I even have a 120mm USB fan pulling air out of it, but it still crashes.

    I want to be able to scale these numbers at least a bit in the future as well. Perhaps not the connections, because the programs I run are completely fine with low TCP timeouts, and I prefer to close the connections faster. But the Internet speed, I want to be able to run 200-300 mbps constantly without crashing every day.

    This is the option I'm considering now, hopefully I can link this here:
    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0741FF4HV/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=AZEYJ27R4YB41

    And I would manually add at least 4-8gb ram, and a some storage space.

    CPU that's in this thing:
    https://ark.intel.com/products/95442/Intel-Core-i3-7100U-Processor-3M-Cache-2_40-GHz

    2c/4t, 2.4ghz. 15w TDP. Is this good enough to do what I want to do?

    Also, can you recommend a switch that can handle this sort of traffic? My servers are in another room, and the switch I have now only has a forwarding rate of 100mbps. I need a switch that can forward more than 100mbps.

    Thank you for the help!

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  • H

    Intel i350-T2 NIC. I'm not sure how much memory bandwidth or CPU you need, but this NIC is awesome.

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  • H

    The NIC's aren't a big deal... it's the router that's dying. I'm not opposed to building a system to run Pfsense, but I don't see why it would be necessary to $100+ NICs. Any Intel NIC would be more than enough. It's really the CPU/firmware that seem to be causing DD-WRT to crash. CPU load never goes above 35%, but I'd rather have an actual Intel processor instead of the one in Linksys router.

    I guess no one else is going to respond though... so I may just order this unit and add a storage drive and RAM:
    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0741FF4HV/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=AZEYJ27R4YB41

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  • Galactic Empire Netgate Banned

    Looks like our SG-3100 is a good fit for your requirements. It can deliver up to a gigabit NAT throughput.

    If you can wait for a little more, we will be introducing another appliance. While I can't say much about the upcoming appliance, it's going to be fast and competitively priced.

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    T
     1 Reply
  • T

    @ivor said in Please help with hardware selection:

    Looks like our SG-3100 is a good fit for your requirements. It can deliver up to a gigabit NAT throughput.

    If you can wait for a little more, we will be introducing another appliance. While I can't say much about the upcoming appliance, it's going to be fast and competitively priced.

    Do you have a rough estimate of how long until available. I am currently going through the process of researching whether to build my own box or purchase one of the netgate appliances.

    Thanks :)

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  • M

    Compared to the $500+ link on Amazon, SG-3100 seems like a good fit for less money if you already have (or don't need) a gigabit switch for the servers. Next step up is the 5100: https://store.netgate.com/SG-5100.aspx ...however, do you have any other requirements besides throughput? Are you using wireless on the Linksys? Or eSATA, or USB 3.0?

    Also, I highly recommend you have a physically separate network for the 3 business servers (e.g., use OPT1 instead of LAN).

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    H
     1 Reply
  • H

    @msf2000 Okay I have no idea what “OPT1” means as I’m a business owner not a network expert. What’s the benefit of doing this? I do not care that much about security, I need performance. If OPT1 is just some security thing I will likely not use it.

    I’m not building a Pfsense to be a firewall, although I know it has one built in which is nice, I’m building is to be a more stable platform than DD-WRT, something that can support 1gbps speeds, 30k connections without crashing every few hours.

    Also the Amazon link is a significantly better CPU than the SG-3100. I’d much prefer having an Intel processor than ARM. There’s also no mention of the type of NIC’s in the Netgate product. The Amazon one has all Intel NIC’s, which I greatly prefer to Realtek.

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