4 ms·

ORP1 - An Open Router Project

6 points by ParadisoShlee 13y ago

dredwerker 13y ago
Seems expensive to me. I didnt really look at the components or r&d involved. Is it that much better than a tomato/dd-wrt based router?
jlawer 13y ago
It feels a little lightweight for the cost. I am not a hardware geek, but I struggle to see what this gets me over a mini ITX board running an Dual Core atom w/ a dual port Gigabit NIC running pfSense besides (what I assume is) a lower power draw. I also worry with all the packets going through the core processor and it only being an 800mhz PPC. Is this going to be able to handle the traffic from a 100mbit connection w/ a protocol like bit torrent creating 100s of connections and it having to NAT that traffic. The major issues I see with Home routers is either complexity or performance. Even here in Australia there exist a reasonable number of people who are able to get 100mbits services on HFC / Fibre. If you were able to include an FGPA that you could offload packet routing to you might have something interesting (can affordable FPGAs do gigabit packet rates?). Obviously an ASIC requires a fairly high production rate to be economical. Maybe a dual processor configuration with a dedicated packet passing processor and an "Application Processor". I want to like this being its from my home city (Brisbane, Australia), but I really can't see the value in it over other devices.
- gonzo 13y ago
  pfSense guy here. If you think a dual core D525 is the sh*t, just wait until you see an 8 core OOE 'Atom' with AES-NI support, and 4 i350 GigE Ethernets running pfSense 2.2 (based on FreeBSD 10, so multi-core pf, etc...) Or the dual core 4 x i350 variant for under $200. yes, very low power.
  - jlawer 13y ago
    Cheers, PFSense has been absolutely amazing for us, with us running 2 boxes to provide routing for inter office links. We looked at it for our core routers about 1 1/2 years ago, and would have gone with it except for it not at that time supporting our hardware in the stable release (ended up with Linux / IPtables / Keepalived due to time constraints). But our testbed (old PowerEdge R200 single dual core proc) handled everything we through at it. Certainly cheeper then the Juniper quote we got... I am really impressed with the upcoming generation of atoms. They seem like they are going to be impressive in both networking and storage.

6 points by ParadisoShlee 13y ago

Seems expensive to me. I didnt really look at the components or r&d involved. Is it that much better than a tomato/dd-wrt based router?

jlawer 13y ago

It feels a little lightweight for the cost. I am not a hardware geek, but I struggle to see what this gets me over a mini ITX board running an Dual Core atom w/ a dual port Gigabit NIC running pfSense besides (what I assume is) a lower power draw. I also worry with all the packets going through the core processor and it only being an 800mhz PPC. Is this going to be able to handle the traffic from a 100mbit connection w/ a protocol like bit torrent creating 100s of connections and it having to NAT that traffic. The major issues I see with Home routers is either complexity or performance. Even here in Australia there exist a reasonable number of people who are able to get 100mbits services on HFC / Fibre. If you were able to include an FGPA that you could offload packet routing to you might have something interesting (can affordable FPGAs do gigabit packet rates?). Obviously an ASIC requires a fairly high production rate to be economical. Maybe a dual processor configuration with a dedicated packet passing processor and an "Application Processor". I want to like this being its from my home city (Brisbane, Australia), but I really can't see the value in it over other devices.

gonzo 13y ago
pfSense guy here. If you think a dual core D525 is the sh*t, just wait until you see an 8 core OOE 'Atom' with AES-NI support, and 4 i350 GigE Ethernets running pfSense 2.2 (based on FreeBSD 10, so multi-core pf, etc...) Or the dual core 4 x i350 variant for under $200. yes, very low power.
- jlawer 13y ago
  Cheers, PFSense has been absolutely amazing for us, with us running 2 boxes to provide routing for inter office links. We looked at it for our core routers about 1 1/2 years ago, and would have gone with it except for it not at that time supporting our hardware in the stable release (ended up with Linux / IPtables / Keepalived due to time constraints). But our testbed (old PowerEdge R200 single dual core proc) handled everything we through at it. Certainly cheeper then the Juniper quote we got... I am really impressed with the upcoming generation of atoms. They seem like they are going to be impressive in both networking and storage.