DD-Wrt Linksys firmwar now runs on plain x86 hardware

[Lazybones]

http://www.graynetwork.org/ddwrtx86/

Up till now there where not really any linux router distros out there that where both easy to setup and offered layer 7 QOS.

If you have high bandwidth needs a linksys routers CPU just wouldn't cut it..

Well now you can run one of the most popular Linksys firmware distros on your own hardware.

[Thorin]

So what kind of hardware would you want to run this on if you want to see a noticeable improvement over the Linksys routers' capabilities?  (ie, what kind of CPU/RAM is in a WRT54G?)

[Tom]

I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm sure its somewhere around 100mhz cpu, and 8MB ram.

[Lazybones]

So what kind of hardware would you want to run this on if you want to see a noticeable improvement over the Linksys routers' capabilities?  (ie, what kind of CPU/RAM is in a WRT54G?)

The CPU and RAM are the limiting factors in the linksys unit.. However to see a difference you would need a 10+ Mbit connection, or many high demand clients running behind it.

The linksys units have between 8 and 16MB of RAM, this limits how long and how many connections they can NAT. If the RAM fills on these units, they crash or auto reset. So a PC with more ram is going to make a difference.

CPU wise they are between a 100 to 200Mhz risk processor of some kind, this limits how many packets they can process per second, they top out at about 10mbits of traffic where they start to degrade your speed.

One place it should be noticeable is if you have more than one Bittorent user in your hows and you are trying to apply QoS over the connection, a low end PC should be able to out pace the Linksys unit by a long shot.

[Tom]

or many high demand clients running behind it.

I regularly kill any "home" cable/DSL router with just bit torrent. Which is why I have stuck with my relatively high maintenance gentoo based firewall/server system. I've killed yours, my dad's, and possibly others. They usually need a power cycle to work again. doesn't matter if its a DLink or a Linksys. I think in a couple extreme cases, I had to use the hard reset button thing. Course that may be due to bad firmware, not saving things properly and then crashing leaving corrupted data on restart.

My little firewall system is a 1.1Ghz box, with 512MB ram, an insane number of firewall rules, bunch of services: NFS (network file storage), NTP, SSH, HTTP, DHCP, MySQL, IceCC (distributed compiler daemon), XFS (X Font Server), Eggdrop (IRC Bot), DNS (I don't use shaw's dns servers )

[Lazybones]

My current setup work well on the Linksys hardware... However it is not as forgiving as having a full PC in there.

Main reason for posting this is because it is a COMPLETE router package with a GOOD UI. I have used MANY MANY MANY other Linux router packages and nothing is quite as easy as these ones based around the Linksys hardware.

If shaw releases a version of Nitro with good upload, I might have to build my self a router... a linksys WRT will not let you get full speed out of a 25 Mbit connection.

[Tom]

Yeah, I actually have no UI for my router. SSH and nano all the way. I haven't found a single firwall distro/software that I liked, and let me install other services.

edit: I forgot to mention one of the fancier services I have loaded, NX, a remote desktop server thing using a specialized compressed version of the X protocol over SSH.

[Shayne]

Yet I've never had a problem with my stock WRT-54G, a good number of bittorrent, webserver, etc.  I really only download what I can watch and plan to watch though, not really a collector.  Download, watch/play, delete.

[Melbosa]

Hmmmm now this is interesting.  With the webservers I am running at home, I can have up to over 1000+ connections coming in at once at my network, including BitTs and Usenet connections.  Sometimes my Linksys router has issues determining the best course for QoS to affect traffic.  Thankfully it always seems to default to HTTP traffic gets priority, but this might be something I should look into.

[Lazybones]

Hmmmm now this is interesting.  With the webservers I am running at home, I can have up to over 1000+ connections coming in at once at my network, including BitTs and Usenet connections.  Sometimes my Linksys router has issues determining the best course for QoS to affect traffic.  Thankfully it always seems to default to HTTP traffic gets priority, but this might be something I should look into.

Not sure how stable the x86 build is yet. However you are correct, this might be a good idea in your environment, although I must say that I find the forums almost always very responsive..

[Melbosa]

Not sure how stable the x86 build is yet. However you are correct, this might be a good idea in your environment, although I must say that I find the forums almost always very responsive..

Yeah, and I think that is because I've been lucky with QoS always promoting HTTP.  Problem is that TS and DNS aren't always making it through, which is an administrative issue for me.