[BC] The wrong way to deal with tech budgets

[Alex Hartman]

I disagree. A typical setup is a single outbound link. Your routing table should consist of TWO routes (LAN default route and WAN default route), maybe 3 if you have a VPN. A 33Mhz cpu can handle routing 10Mbit of traffic on a /24 netblock. The local table of established connections might become an issue, but i doubt it. DD-WRT does just fine on trivial hardware, so it's really an issue of sloppy code from the firmware vendors. Unless you have a routed netblock and are advertising BGP routes and do OSPF internally, would CPU horsepower become an issue.

VPN is a different story. You have encryption to deal with. That takes MUCHO CPU. And yes, that should be a dedicated piece of hardware, but for general routing around a medium sized office (40-100 users) any off-the-shelf router is capable. 2-3 hours of research on how to properly configure QoS and such to suit your needs should be all it takes. When i worked in the ISP industry, we used some heavy iron routers (Cisco mostly, 7513's and 7206VXRs hooked into big 4000 series switches with thousands of ports) designed to route 10's of thousands of users with sustained throughput upwards of 500Mbit/s. Our internal office LAN however was controlled by a simple "cable modem" router. Why? Because we're really just accessing resources on the local LAN. 20 users going to the same server for text files takes NOTHING.

At my "day job" my entire office network is run off a 24 port linksys switch and a d-link soho router from officemax. 15 users, but it's heavy traffic (we're a production house). We schlep around large audio/video files all day long internally, but externally, i've got 3 shotgunned T1's for bandwidth. Proper QoS set on the D-Link router ensures that no single user can saturate the pipe. It's actually really simple. All my external servers live in a DMZ outside of the D-Link, but run through an "old" celeron 1.8Ghz machine running Untangle active packet inspector/anti-virus/intrusion detection system.  I do this mostly for spam email control and security. But i have an "IT" background, so it's trivial for me to do, asking a 60+ year old RF guy to do this i would think would be akin to asking a paraplegic to do a triathalon.

So, if you think about how the typical broadcast facility is laid out, you have a LOT going on within the LAN, but you should have damn near nothing going externally. (and if you do, it's web pages, maybe remote broadcasts through a codec, etc. Low bandwidth items).

--
Alex Hartman

It's not the bandwidth that's the problem, it's the fact that the router has
>to ROUTE packets to so many computers. Keeping track of that routing table
>gets to be CPU intensive with a lot of computers on the network-and the cheap
>router just can't keep up-so it begins dropping packets.

>-D

>From: radiowavesokc at gmail.com

>Dana:

>Do you have a list of recommended routers that a person should use? I'm
>getting tired of lousy routers, even for residential use. I'd like to find
>something that will work for years correctly, and provide no breakup issues in
>streaming (if the connection is acceptable of course).

>Thanks!

>O