possible router platforms

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 09:33:26PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> 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.

On a 5GHz band I regularly pass 100Mbit/s throughput.  I don't think
I have ever passed 200Mbit/s though, so 100 wouldn't be much if a
noticeable limiter.

> 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.

Certainly some can do it.  Perfectly reasonable way to set things up.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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