I'm done with routers. Totally fed up of them running out of RAM, taking too long to open new connections, not being able to open more connections if someone is using 200 to torrent, fed up of them forgetting static IP assignments, port forwards, upnp never working...
I got fed up of all that and decided to do something about it. Routers have 8, 16mb of RAM? My worst computer that's lying around has 256mb. Slap another ethernet card in, install iptables, it's one day's work tops and your router will never crash and never forget anything again. My personal best is 7,000 torrents all going at once with the internet still being fairly usable.
Power consumption isn't great compared to a dedicated router, obviously. Noise wasn't a problem - old hardware doesn't put out much heat, so cooling it with fans is easily do-able at very low noise levels.
A future project I have in mind is to do the same thing but with ultra low power components, e.g. Intel Atom or something along those lines. I aim to get under 10W draw from the wall.
I got fed up of all that and decided to do something about it. Routers have 8, 16mb of RAM? My worst computer that's lying around has 256mb. Slap another ethernet card in, install iptables, it's one day's work tops and your router will never crash and never forget anything again. My personal best is 7,000 torrents all going at once with the internet still being fairly usable.