DIY FTTC Router Spec'

charlie101 · 10-15-2012, 04:56 PM

Hi

I need a router for an fttc connection.
Rather than buy one I thought I might use an old PC I have lying around.
The machine has an athlon xp 2000+ (1661 MHz) with 1GB of ram.
I will have a small internal network ( 5 machines) and possibly an externally visible network offering services (two machines).

Do you think this old machine will have enough horse power?

Which distribution would be best (robust and lightweight) to use for this?

Thanks

jefro · 10-16-2012, 02:59 PM

Kind of puney I'd think. Any software based may not keep up with a fiber connection. Simple enough to try. Might look at untangle linux but there are many others.

charlie101 · 10-16-2012, 05:51 PM

Hi Jefro

Thanks for your reply.
I guessed it might a bit under strength which is also why I asked which software would be best ie not a lot of head room.
I thought I'd ask as I've always heard that you don't need much hardware for a router.

Have you got any recommendation if I were to buy one?

Thank again.

jefro · 10-16-2012, 07:52 PM

Like I said, it would be easy to try to build this. It may only take 30 minutes to 2 hours.

There are very small router distro's and some specialty ones like freesco. Some of the oldest distro's are floppy based and still work.

I'd think that you could get best results if you use checksum offload to the nic's. That would help remove a lot of the cpu load.

Instead of a simple router which you can buy for a song like dd-wrt types, consider a bit more of an advanced firewall/router.

charlie101 · 10-17-2012, 05:30 AM

Thanks for the offload tip.
I'll give it a go and see how it performs.