Third recommendation for the PCEngines ALIX board / pfSense combo. It
really can't be beat in terms of performance, cost, stability, ease of use,
and flexibility.

I've been running pfSense on an ALIX 2d3 board for years (5-6?) now at
home, and have deployed many of the same setup in SMB environments. I've
seamlessly upgraded through several revisions of pfSense, and haven't had a
single issue. pfSense will do nearly any network-related function you want
it to, vlans, traffic shaping, policy routing, load balancing, BGP, Squid,
OpenVPN, IPSec, etc. in addition to all of the standard routing/firewall
bits that you'd expect.

At work, I'm running pfSense on a Soekris board, only because I needed 4
physical interfaces and the ALIX boards top out at three interfaces. The
soekris boards are very nice as well, but are more expensive, and for most
home/small business use, are more hardware than is really needed.

-Erik


On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom <
chrome at real-time.com> wrote:

> So it seems that my Buffalo router running DD-WRT is starting to flake out.
> It drops about 1-2% of its packets. Replacing it with an ancient
> cobbled-together linux box (still around as a backup from the last time my
> router device went belly-up) solved most of the packet loss (tho not all).
>
> So I need recommendations based on people's experiences with the latest
> generation of router devices. I'm sick of building linux routers out of
> desktop machines, and would rather run something on a small solid-state
> device.
>
> I remember Soekris boxen got some attention when they were new.
> http://soekris.com/products.html
> These look pretty modern:
> http://soekris.com/products/net6501.html
>
> They're spendy, but hopefully it's good-quality hardware which I won't have
> to replace every few years because it dies.
>
> Does anyone have recommendations on hardware that:
> a: runs linux
> b: is likely to keep running instead of dying after a few years
> c: is cheaper than the above Soekris solution
> ?
>
> --
> Carl Soderstrom
> Systems Administrator
> Real-Time Enterprises
> www.real-time.com
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>
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