Home CPE choice

Blake Pfankuch bpfankuch at cpgreeley.com
Wed Mar 31 23:34:38 UTC 2010


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

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles N Wyble [mailto:charles at knownelement.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2010 4:56 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Home CPE choice


Hopefully this e-mail is considered operational content :)


The recent thread on the new linkys kit and ipv6 support got me thinking about CPE choice.

What good off the shelf solutions are out there? Should one buy the high end d-link/linksys/netgear products? I've had bad experiences with those (netgear in particular).

Should one get a "real" cisco router? The 877 or something? Maybe an ASA or the new small business targeted ISR (can't recall the model number off hand right now). There is mikrotik but I'm not so sure about the operating system.

Is there a market for a new breed of CPE running OpenWRT or pfsense on hardware with enough CPU/RAM to not fall over?

Granted that won't cost $79.00 at best buy. However it seems to me that decent CPE is going to run a couple hundred dollars in order to have sufficient ram/cpu.

My current home router is a cisco 1841. I keep my 6mbps DSL line pretty much saturated all the time. Often times my wife will be watching Hulu in the living room, I'll be streaming music and running torrents (granted I have tuned my Azures client fairly well) all at the same time and it's a good experience.  Running that kind of traffic load through my linksys would cause it to need a reboot once or more a day.

What are folks here running in SOHO environments that doesn't require too frequent oil changes :)






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