possible router platforms

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>

| On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 12:39:01PM -0400, James Knott wrote
| 
| > How many people have an internet connection that's better than 100 
| > Mb/s?  I expect many could get by with a 10 Mb NIC.
| 
|   If you only have one computer, yes.  But if you have more than one
| machine, and want to transfer files between them, a gigabit connection
| is nice.

At least in my case, James has a point.  I have two "outward facing"
connections.  They are consumer broadband so neither actually
challenges 100Mb/s.

Transfers within a network don't require the router to touch them.

I also have a spare Acer Revo -- one 1Gb/s interface.  I don't know
how well it could drive a USB 2.0 ethernet interface.  If it was
efficient and effective, I could use those interfaces for facing
outward.  (Lennart has pointed out that USB is fairly high overhead.
I should measure what the Revo can handle throug a USB ethernet
interface.)

At the moment, I have three internal networks.  One is wireless so it
doesn't count.  The others should be 1Gb/s.  I might add more
networks.

Currently, each outward facing connection has a separate router.  It
seemed to make the configuring simpler and the redundancy made the
system a little more robust.  I'd like to do this with one router.

I rarely need to do gigabit transfers between my networks (i.e. with a
router in the middle).  I don't imagine that 802.11n pushes 100Mb/s
very often.

One work-around that I've considered is to gang a PC (like the Revo)
with a cheap commodity wireless router.  Use the PC's 1Gb/s interface
to carry a bundle of VLANs that get demultiplexed by the hacked
wireless router.  I think that at least some wireless routers can do
that demultiplexing in hardware (as opposed to firmware which would
likely be too slow).  But I haven't tried this.
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