Dsl Router Recommendations

[nikster]

I need a new DSL router to replace my age-ing Zyxel Prestige 660H. The Zyxel was a very good router but it's over 2 years old and has been used 24/7 without any additional cooling. It's held up well but I think it will reach the end of its useful life soon. I have had some DSL dropouts recently that were suspicious although with TOT it might very well be on their side.

Still, I would also want some new features as provided by some open source firmwares I have seen. Somebody here posted pictures from Tomato which looked excellent.

Does anybody have a recommendation for a router + open source firmware?

Ideally it would do all the normal things like firewall, router, etc but also some extra things such as limiting the bandwidth of certain users so they don't clog the connection etc. Also it would be nice to be able to access the router via telnet and have documentation for that. The zyxel has telnet access but no documentation so it's rather hard to use.

The hardware should be solid as well, naturally.

I prefer no wireless function because it's going to be hooked into a fairly elaborate existing wireless network. So if it had wireless, I would just have to turn it off.

thanks!

Edited October 17, 2007 by nikster

[nikster]

Hmm... the only open source firmwares I can find are for wireless routers, not DSL modems. So I guess I will have to give up on the open source part...

[rainman]

The one I use is from 'tactio' and I believe cost around 1,900 Baht in Hardware House International (Panthip or IT Square). It has pretty much everything you need. Port forwarding, firewall, etc. Does the job well and can connect up to 4 computers.

[monty]

I just built my very own router

Bought one of these Japanese IBM sell offs for 2000 Baht (you can find hundreds of them in Pantip, very reliable as well!), celeron 800, 128 MB and a little 20 gb HD inside. Put two extra LAN cards inside to make a total of 3 LAN ports.

Then installed the PFsense open source router software, hooked up my cable modem and my adsl modem to two of the lan ports, with the third port feeding my network.

I now have a very configurable internet supply, the router is set up to do both load balancing and failover, so as long as one of my internet connections is working, nobody would even notice the other one is down...

The router can handle pretty much any task, captive portal, user name/password requirement for people accessing the internet, bandwidth management, on a port basis or application basis (so I can keep those P2P leachers nice and slow, while keeping VOIP crystal clear) and much more. Obviously telnet access, it has dynamic dns service updaters built in, all the works

more info here: http://www.pfsense.com/

[Veazer]

Hmm... the only open source firmwares I can find are for wireless routers, not DSL modems. So I guess I will have to give up on the open source part...

I had a d-link adsl-604t combo router/dsl modem that had some decent alternative firmware available. The feature set was great but it was never quite as fast as the dlink firmware. That may have improved since i tried it. You can find them for around 2000 baht at times, but i'm not sure how available they are now.

The RouterTech open source firmware is available here. I would check their forums and see what hardware they recommend. The 604T is not the ideal router for this firmware, I lost wifi-to-lan connectivity (wifi clients cannot see ethernet clients and vice-vera) with the firmware but it was a known problem with the 604T.

[autonomous_unit]

I am running a DLink DSL-G604t (since 2004) and using the OpenWRT firmware for the past year or so. It performs better than any stock DLink firmware ever did, but that is talking about LAN-WAN behavior. The wireless is essentially useless with the OpenWRT firmware so I don't even try to include the drivers (you may be able to make it work as a _client_ without WEP or WPA security...). There is a reasonable 'qos-scripts' package which helps manipulate routing priorities and such, but I've never tried to customize it to differentiate certain LAN stations. It is nice for differentiation of bulk, normal, and express traffic into separate queues. Of course, nothing is perfect when you're only doing doing this on one end of the slow link. No firmware is going to fix the ridiculous performance of TOT these days, unfortunately.

I still have to run development branch stuff which I have to checkout from subversion and compile myself, as the TI AR7 platform hasn't made it into a supported release yet. This means you're playing dice with finding yourself a stable revision, and it would help to have multiple devices so you could keep one operational while easily preparing a new one for testing or switchover for real daily use. As it is, I have to allot myself a few hours of downtime to try a new firmware build and make absolutely sure I have older images around to restore, unless I want to try to use my backup GPRS to go searching the Internet for help! Once you start using this stuff, you get very good at using the low-level ADAM2 firmware of the router to load new flash images...

Also, there is no complete web GUI for the development branch of OpenWRT (called "Kamikaze"), so it is purely ssh-based command-line administration for me. But, it's a real Linux 2.6 kernel system with jffs2 flash filesystem and a pretty nice little configuration/scripting system to make many common tasks easier. The X-Wrt project makes a pretty nice web GUI for OpenWRT, but its last stable release is for the older "Whiterussian" release of OpenWRT.

[dsys]

loads of the netgear products are open source. Try the DG834. Or FVS338. List of open source netgear products -

http://kbserver.netgear.com/inquira/defaul...589#__highlight

[Richard-BKK]

100% open source are the D-link DSL-G604T and the newest DSL-2640T. They run a Linux distro and the whole firmware (operating system) source code is available for download.

For the Netgear products the are still proprietary source drivers needed to control some parts of the router/modem, so Netgear is not 100% opensource ....