Confession time, appliance or bsd-box

I must confess, I have 3 computers running FreeBSD at home but I use a linksys router on the dsl connection. I ran a BSD box setup for several years but "fell off the wagon" and bought the linksys.

Do you run a cracker box router or a BSD-box??


Can you tell it's a slow afternoon here. =)
 
At home, I use a TP-Link 108 Mbps wireless router with UPnP enabled.

At work, I use FreeBSD boxes for packet filtering.
 
Well, I can pick up a WRT54G for around $25, so it's kinda hard to justify a full-on router unless I actually need one. But who knows, maybe one day I'll want some $45000 monster that can embroider every packet in real time with little hanging sheep in gold thread.
 
Matty said:
do they have 1Gb lan _and_ wan ports?
Soekris have teased us with specs of the Net6501 that will have 4 1Gb LAN ports as well as PCIe expansion, but it's not available yet and I'm not holding my breath.

For that you should rather consider a recent Atom board. Supermicro make one with 2 1Gb NICs. For more ports you might consider using 802.1q based VLANs with a Routerboard RB250GS (cheap).
 
Well, ubiquiti RSPRO have 4 x 1Gb ports (1 wan + 3 lan) and it's _really_ working fine with -current.
Some other hardware also work, but generally the flash size is too small for FreeBSD (SOHO routers with (working) USB ports provide an easy way to workaround this).
We've started a list of supported devices, but it is still in its infancy:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/AdrianChadd/EmbeddedDevices
 
I have four FreeBSD machines that are critical to my network--two routers, and two servers. One router and server is at a family member's home, and in exchange for managing their network I get to cheaply colocate my network services and backups. The other two are on my end, doing the same thing.
 
4 FreeBSD boxed acting as routers in 4 different city locations. Reason: using the old P1,P2 & P3's I had in my basement simply because they were occupying space and I also need other applications like apache, samba (1 box is acting as a NAS (a total of 2TB is provided) - another one as a FTP server). I have ipsec/racoon based VPN between them because each machine carries a SOHO network with around 5-7 windows clients; also using bind as cache server :).

Simply put, I prefer pc's because they are more flexible for my and my client's needs.

PS: 5th box should become available sometime during the summer (4th one was activated last week-end)
 
Cisco 836 router and a PIX 515 with 6 interfaces for my small SOHO environment. There is a FreeBSD box also acting as a proxy server. If I didn't have the PIX I would probably go with OpenBSD and PF.
 
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