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Is Linux the best choice for a router, or would one of the BSDs work better? Obviously the author chose Linux because he was most familiar with it, and that's a
by mark-r 10y ago
Is Linux the best choice for a router, or would one of the BSDs work better? Obviously the author chose Linux because he was most familiar with it, and that's an excellent reason, but I'm curious what the choice would be if you were starting with a clean slate.
- dogma1138 10y agoIt doesn't really matter that much the problem with most homebrew routers will be the hardware you need a pretty decent desktop and some good network cards to match the performance of mid range home routers. I had a router like that for a couple of years running pfsense which is based on BSD but since London got a 1gbit ISP I had to switch to a normal router unless I wanted to invest like a 1000$ in hardware.
- gradschool 10y agoWhich ISP is that? (not Virgin, I hope)
- dogma1138 10y agoHyperoptic
- gonzo 10y agoIt doesn't take $1k of hw to run pfsense at 1gbps. I have 1gbps / 1 gbps in Austin, own the company behind pfsense, and run just fine on a 4 core Atom.
- mhurron 10y agoI found pf's syntax to be much clearer and easier to write, so I chose OpenBSD for my home router.
- vbezhenar 10y agoCentOS 7 (and probably some other distributions) contain firewalld which is much easier to configure than iptables. You can easily setup NAT, open and forward ports, so most of typical router tasks are very easy. Though if you encounter untypical task, you have to learn iptables, of course.
- Spivak 10y agoFor reference it's at least RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Fedora 21+, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, and Gentoo. Source: http://www.firewalld.org/documentation/ http://www.firewalld.org/documentation/
- ptman 10y agoI've used ferm <http://ferm.foo-projects.org/> http://ferm.foo-projects.org/> to have iptables behave more like pf
- rjsw 10y agoProbably doesn't make any difference now but there was a time when some of the operating systems didn't have PPPoE support in the kernel.