Interesting router feature

[johnridley]

With Charter's new bandwidth cap, I wanted to make sure that the router kept track of our usage. It's got several options for saving data regularly, but the non-volatile ones were "not suggested" since it writes to NVRAM and if you do that too often you can wear it out.

But it turns out that this router can mount a shared hard drive within your network and use that for data storage. Pretty cool. Tomato firmware on a Linksys WRT-54GL, btw.

Comments

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

I keep being tempted to get a Soekris net5501 and use that, but as my current firewall, Trashwall does basically the same thing at lower cost and with more flexibility, I can't justify it.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I used to run a Linux box as a firewall, but I like to run something that only burns a few watts instead.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's one thing that moving to the Soekris would do for me. I don't think it would pay for itself for a few years, though.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

A Linksys router draws about 3 watts, so 35 watts less than the Mac is drawing. So 306.6 KWh per year, for a $33.73 savings per year. That's about 2 years payback, WRT54GLs are between $50 and $75 I think.

The Soekris probably draws way more than 8 watts. Not sure why it's needed for a home network, though. A Linksys running an open source firmware can do a lot. Tomato gives you pretty complete custom routing, port forwarding, bandwidth monitoring, QoS, etc.

[c0nsumer.livejournal.com]

Hmm, yeah. That'd justify the Linksys, but I personally would really prefer something that runs OpenBSD or FreeBSD so I can use PF. Hmm, I wonder if I could get my funky firewall setup happening under Linux...