Low Power Home Router; Advice.
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It is nothing final yet, but i was thinking of building a low power router. Four functions i would be seeking from it would be:
- Gigabit LAN.
- Host a Squid proxy server and an OpenVPN client to route traffic through.
- Lower the latency caused by torrents.
- VLANs
I am by no means an expert in networking technology so bear with me. i wish to split my network into two segments. I have a torrent server, to which i want to put on its own VLAN, and another typical segment that will contain my machine and a file server. Both network segments needs access to the proxy server and gigabit (or close to it) speeds across the board for a single user.
The goal is that, from the viewpoint of my torrent server, only the router and proxy server are visible. The other network segment, where my machine is, has a scope of the entire network; is this possible?
Questions:
I don't really know enough about VLANs. Can someone suggest quality material to read up on?
Would the Atom N510 and some good Intel NICs provide adequate hardware?
Is the PCI bus found on Atom motherboards good enough? What would you guys suggest?
Is there a favourite N510 based board you guys like that meets the criteria?Thanks a lot.
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Squid is a notorious resource pig and it gets worse as speed increases. It also doesn't play nicely with solid state, limited write media. Everything else in your checklist is perfectly fine with pfSense.
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You don't say what your internet bandwidth is. This is probably the most important factor is sizing your firewall.
You will struggle to get 'close to gigabit' speeds between the two VLANs. 300-400Mbps is probably realistic.Steve
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Thanks
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Squid is a notorious resource pig and it gets worse as speed increases.Can you suggest another proxy server?
It also doesn't play nicely with solid state, limited write media.
i will switch off caching.
You don't say what your internet bandwidth is.
16Mbit
You will struggle to get 'close to gigabit' speeds between the two VLANs. 300-400Mbps is probably realistic.
Why so?
Thanks.
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If you're not using caching, why bother use squid at all?
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@AlbinoPenguin:
You will struggle to get 'close to gigabit' speeds between the two VLANs. 300-400Mbps is probably realistic.
Why so?
Thanks.Because, as two seperate interfaces, pfSense will be filtering traffic between them and the Atom just doesn't have enough processing power to get much higher than that.
See this post for some extensive test results from a D510 based system.Steve
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@AlbinoPenguin:
You will struggle to get 'close to gigabit' speeds between the two VLANs. 300-400Mbps is probably realistic.
Why so?
Thanks.Because, as two seperate interfaces, pfSense will be filtering traffic between them and the Atom just doesn't have enough processing power to get much higher than that.
See this post for some extensive test results from a D510 based system.Steve
Huh. Now I need to go test my setup and see what performance is like. I haven't done anything high traffic between them yet.
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I'd be interested in any results you get.
There have recently been some posts showing that you should be able to get a far higher throughput on an Atom board. However the actual throughput seems often limited by the NIC/driver.
My own testing showed my box may be capable of 650Mbps (with a 1.5GHz Pentium-M) however it is almost certainly limited by it's Marvell NICs and inefficiencies in it's driver. Recent updates to the driver in OpenBSD have showed huge improvements.Use Intel NICs if you want high throughput! ;)
Steve
