Home CPE choice

Thu Apr 1 01:30:55 UTC 2010

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 4:34 PM, Blake Pfankuch <bpfankuch at cpgreeley.com>wrote:

> I'm running IPcop on a mini ITX machine (old processor out of my laptop
> T5500), a cheapo stick of memory and a sata to CF adaptor with a 4gb CF
> card.  All in all cost me about $350.  Been running IPcop's for about 6
> years now on various hardware going back to a dual p3 500 with 256mb of ram
> and no complaints aside from ipv6 support which is slated for the 2.x
> branch.  I have a 50/10 cable line which I have kept saturated for multiple
> days at a time, 5 public IP's about 60 firewall rules and 3 network
> interfaces (LAN, WAN and guest wireless).  I migrated from a PPPOE dsl
> provider to cable about a year and a half ago.  Also physically moved about
> that time and never powered off the device, or had any issues whatsoever.
>
> The UI is a bit weird, but once you set it up you never touch it.
>
> 17:16:19 up 568 days, 19:36, 0 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
>
>
<snip>

Running IPcop on a circa 1995 PIII, 128 Mb Ram, I believe its 5Gb disk 3 of
5 I originally setup about 10 years ago when I decided on this platform (2
have died so far), total cost $0 using repurposed systems. It runs a DHCP
LAN/Wan with a small dmz off it and other than security based upgrades
hasn't been touched since it was installed. I just checked, its been up 496
days without a hiccup this time, probably since our last power outage which
was longer than the 10 minutes my little ups will manage :)

Had a problem the other day and my provider "unamed", "Largest BC/Canada/DSL
provider" finally got it fixed. One of the things they said was broken is
the 12 year old DSL modem they provided and so they sent me a free
replacement to get things up to speed. But wait, this is where things get
interesting, they sent me an IP4 based NAT router. I called back and
said, "That won't work I need at leat a couple of Internet Reachable
addresses to use.".

Long story short, they are no longer providing addresses anymore, only Nat
(was a battle but I managed to get them to send me a replacement
modem/bridge instead), thus said Company will be recovering thousands of
addresses over the next little while from all their residential customers to
use somewhere else and lowering the functionality for the customer.

On a side note, IPV6 was not available, was not in their plans, and there
was no beta list, volunteer list, interest list, etc for people to express
interest with.

In the 1990's this Company was praised for its forward thinking :)

cheers