Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: OT: Best home-office router?

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13: Re: OT: Best home-office router? (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 09/17/04 08:33 PM
Hm, seems you can get an Edimax BR-6541 router with four WAN ports for $250, or the similar BR-6524 dual WAN model for $144. I could only find one review of these, but he does mention a QOS feature which keeps ssh sessions lag-free even during large downloads. Looks promising. No idea how it works internally though, and unlike the (single WAN port only) Linksys boxes, no detectable hacking community surrounding it.
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17: Re: OT: Best home-office router? (response to 13)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 10/22/04 04:40 PM
I've been using the Edimax BR-6524 dual WAN router for a while now. It seems to basically work fine, however, I have not really tested out its QOS or dual WAN features much yet.

One thing it does not seem to have is any easy way to say, "Heh router, please send this particular request out over WAN 2, not WAN 1." That can be important, because I've noticed some latency sensitive applications (rdesktop, VNC) perform noticeably better over DSL than cable modem.

The router does let you statically map particular LAN IP addresses to different WAN interfaces. That's a pretty blunt instrument, but I know it's possible to assign multiple IP addresses to a single ethernet interface in Linux. So, maybe I can do that, then somehow control which IP address gets used on the Linux box, whenever I invoke wget or the like.

A few other fancy features of this router that I've noticed:

  • It works as an NTP client, but unfortunately you can only give it one NTP server to talk to, and you must enter the IP address of the server, not a host name.
  • It is set up to dynamic DNS with either dyndns.org or tzo.com, but I haven't tried that.
  • A stateful packet inspection firewall feature, which I also haven't tried.

Unfortunately, AFAICT you can't telnet or ssh to this router, the only way to configure it is via its web UI. No SSL on the web UI, just plain http. Also, you can't even see the router status page unless you first type in the admin password, which is foolish and annoying.