After a couple of SOHO router iterations (not all my own, sometimes seen via other people), recurring problems:
- overheating devices due to bad design
- crappy stock firmware
- bugs (that often never get fixed, or updates are never applied)
- other assorted silly issues, like a 1000-connection session table, or small arp tables, or or or …
Much like the rest of the local linux community, I’d long just done DSL bridging and let a Linux box do the work of Real Internet Connection(tm), but that’s not the easiest pitch for Joe Average Home User. So I found an alternative set of things that works fairly well, and is solid enough for you to fire rockets at it. The recipe is as follows
- 1x DSL bridge of some kind. Some Broadcom chipsets are excellent
- 1x Non-shit router
- A RB750 is pretty good for this. Gets your packets going without too much fancy. Has other benefits too
- 1x Extra switch, because cheap gigabit is good
- again, a Tenda unit
- there are some cheap tp-links and HPs around too that I’ve had before
Cheap, effective, and just slightly annoying on amount of power sockets used. The power used is fairly low, too (we’ve had to test it on another project before, and it’s something like R20/month).
I’ll update the post a bit later with the basic tik config to apply.