[GTALUG] Deal on open source compatible router

Lennart Sorensen lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Mon Nov 21 23:44:52 EST 2016


On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 09:02:09PM -0500, CLIFFORD ILKAY via talk wrote:
> On 21/11/16 01:55 PM, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
> >I see NCIX has the Linksys WRT1900ACS on sale today for $200 (down from
> >the usual $300).
> >
> >I have the WRT1900ACv2 which is the same hardware as the ACS and am
> >running LEDE (https://www.lede-project.org/) on it and it works great.
> >
> >Not bad for a router with dual Cortex-A9 1.6GHz CPU, 512MB ram, 128MB
> >flash, USB3 and USB2 eSATAp.
> 
> I want to replace my aging PII-266 small form factor Compaq with 128M of RAM
> running IPCop but it's not clear to me why I'd pick this device over a
> fanless PC, like the Zotac ZBOX CI323 Nano
> <http://www.ncix.com/detail/zotac-zbox-ci323-nano-u-1e-126183.htm>, which is
> similar to the Zotac boxes that Hugh pointed out a few weeks ago. It may end
> up costing marginally more money to put together a firewall/gateway device
> with the Zotac but it seems to me that I'd have a more fully featured
> device. What does the Linksys offer that the Zotac doesn't have, other than
> wi-fi, which I don't care about since I already have "fast enough" wi-fi
> anyway?

Well once you add storage and ram, the price is quite a bit higher,
and you don't get a nice Wifi access point (which for most people is a
useful thing).

You get slightly lower power consumption as far as I can tell with
the linksys.

And you get a nice gigabit switch with vlan support.

The linksys has nice marvell network ports, not shitty realteks.  Now if
the zotac had bothered to put intel network chips in there, then that
would be a different story.

A decade ago I would have built a router from a PC, but not anymore.

-- 
Len Sorensen


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