Hardware for 120Mbps Wan connection
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Hello, i need to buy a router that can handle 120Mbps wan connection, what hardware do you recomend ? i need at least 3 Gigabit ports, fanless (if possible). I was reading some informations about VIA and Atheros, is it possible to build my own router with this hardware ? Need some help here.
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If you only need 120Mbps between two ports at a time and it is mostly bulk traffic, the Netgate Hamakua DT (http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?cPath=60_85&products_id=659) is a great system at a good price. I have two and with 1.2.3 I've been able to reliably push 135Mbps from LAN to a VLAN with ~200 PF rules over the 5 NICs and 6 additional VLANs. It does take some tweaking to handle that much traffic, but it can be done. The real constraint seems to be the driver for the NICs and tuning it to handle high packet rates. If you are expecting a high packets per second rate, you might run out of CPU before you hit 120Mbps.
Sadly, if you think you'll be doing enough PPS to saturate the Netgate, you probably will need to move up to a fairly beefy machine that won't be compact or fanless. I'm pretty sure that an Atom wouldn't be that much of a step up from the Netgate. You'd be looking at a desktop or workstation processor at a minimum.
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i agrre with you. I was thinking, in something like this (http://es.kontron.com/products/boards+and+mezzanines/embedded+motherboards/miniitx+motherboards/ktgm45mitx.html) with a t9400, 2 GB RAM and 500GB HD. I think it has enough power to handle hi speed routing and some SQUID control. What do you think ?
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I think that board will be fine for the WAN connection.
It's the way you state that you would like 3Gbe connections. This leads me to believe that you want to route some traffic between LAN subnets. Not entirly sure if that board would do well for that, as that kind of setup is very much dependant on the PCI Express bus in that board..
It may be great, and if you have the money to spare then by all means please try it and report back your finding, as I'd be very interested in knowing what kind of speeds you get.
If that doesn't work, you'd want to look into a server class board. Something like a Supermicro board can be found within a decent price range…
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You should consider moving up to a machine with pci-e and higher bus speed. An Atom CPU is going to be a hindrance as you will be working it pretty hard while a 1066Mhz bus dual or quad core intel will easily have enough power to handle this load.
Maybe even more importantly, get GOOD nic cards not cheap broadcom cards. I like the intel pro cards, very fast and reliable.