Router issues...

[iago]

My Linksys router is pretty good at re-establishing the connection quickly, Linux might not be so good. My friend used to use Linux for PPPoE, and he got a lot of nasty crashes.

WRT-54G is Linux, so that's a pretty bad argument :)

When I lived in the Fraternity house, I set up a Gentoo box to serve as a gateway/NATing router. Before we spent the money on the dedicated machine, I tried several different flavors of firmware for WRT-54G (we got three of these so we could get WiFi almost everywhere in the house), and none of them could scale to the ~50 computers on the network. They simply didn't have enough ram to persist that many connections.

We also bought two 20-something-port 100MBit/2-port gigabit switches, which we planted in the attic. It took about a month for me and one other person to finish wiring every room (2 singles, 14 doubles, 2 triples). It's been 4 years, and the system only gone down once in that entire time, due to the power going out.

In going with this solution, I realized how crippled these little boxes really are. As switches, they are fine, but the minute you start relying on a limited-RAM machine to perform NAT, you're pretty screwed. Aside from the obvious benefit of not having to reboot the WRTs six times a day, the internet-bound latency dropped significantly, and WiFi connections stopped dropping.

It's not really an argument so much as a true story.

My friends used to use Gentoo for their PPPoE connection, and it would regularly kernel panic when the PPPoE dropped. This was as recently as maybe 6 months ago. As such, I don't trust Linux to maintain a stable PPPoE connection.

At the moment, I'm using Linux as a gateway/switch. All the router does is a dumb PPPoE connection. Everything else is handled behind it.

[Joe]

[half-sarcastic]And it can't even do that right.[/half-sarcastic]

[Camel]

I don't understand how you can keep saying that, iago. Your WRT-54G has a Linux kernel, and uses almost entirely (excluding the web interface) upstream open-source software, so it's completely absurd to blame Linux' PPPoE support. A better explanation would be that your friend just doesn't know how to use Gentoo, since Linux PPPoE has been stable for almost a decade.

[iago]

You don't understand how I tell a true story that actually happened? It's pretty easy, you start with facts and go from there. That's what I keep saying!

Whether or not WRT54g is running Linux under the hood, it's pretty specialized hardware. Definitely different than what you'd have in a standard desktop/server. That's the best explanation I can think of for the difference, but who knows? Whatever the case, I'm not going to take the effort of setting up PPPoE on a gateway machine when the potential consequences outweigh the benefits.

And for what it's worth, I'd gamble that the people running the box have more Linux experience than anybody here. They definitely knew what they were doing. It's pretty hard to cause kernel panics with stock systems by simply not knowing what you're doing. :P

[Camel]

Whether or not WRT54g is running Linux under the hood, it's pretty specialized hardware. Definitely different than what you'd have in a standard desktop/server.

What's special about a 125MHz ARM processor connected to a 4-port switch and some LEDs?

Whatever the case, I'm not going to take the effort of setting up PPPoE on a gateway machine when the potential consequences outweigh the benefits.

I'm not suggesting that you should; I just think the arguments you made are unfounded, because they beg the question.

[iago]

Whether or not WRT54g is running Linux under the hood, it's pretty specialized hardware. Definitely different than what you'd have in a standard desktop/server.

What's special about a 125MHz ARM processor connected to a 4-port switch and some LEDs?

The difference is, it's designed for one very special purpose in life: networking. When something is specialized, it typically handles weird cases better.

Whatever the case, I'm not going to take the effort of setting up PPPoE on a gateway machine when the potential consequences outweigh the benefits.

I'm not suggesting that you should; I just think the arguments you made are unfounded, because they beg the question.
[/quote]
What I'm saying isn't even an argument.. it's a true story. That happened. You can't really refute that..

[Joe]

I think we can conclude this now. Camel obviously wants iago to set up a Linux box as a router, and iago obviously isn't going to do it. Case closed.

[Camel]

This is what I was referring to:

My Linksys router is pretty good at re-establishing the connection quickly, Linux might not be so good. My friend used to use Linux for PPPoE, and he got a lot of nasty crashes.

I think we can conclude this now. Camel obviously wants iago to set up a Linux box as a router, and iago obviously isn't going to do it. Case closed.

When did I say iago should do this? I was just pointing out that iago was blaming the wrong thing for his friend's kernel panics.

[iago]

This is what I was referring to:

My Linksys router is pretty good at re-establishing the connection quickly, Linux might not be so good. My friend used to use Linux for PPPoE, and he got a lot of nasty crashes.

And semantics aside, I think it's still valid. :P

I think we can conclude this now. Camel obviously wants iago to set up a Linux box as a router, and iago obviously isn't going to do it. Case closed.

When did I say iago should do this? I was just pointing out that iago was blaming the wrong thing for his friend's kernel panics.

Don't get trolled. :P