Cable router

[knaapie]

I am looking for a cable router to hook up my multiple machines to the internet.
I have some information now on Linksys, Netgear and Umax offerings, but I am wondering what the experience is of people who already have a cable router.
I'm especially interested in ease of use, drawbacks and would like to know which functionality you use, like DHCP, NAT and firewalling (is this good enough or should I set up an additional firewall on my PC).

Also I found that not all docs mention external DHCP client (so if my ISP uses DHCP). Is this standard on a cable router or should I check if it is really there?

Your opinion is much appreciated.

[YaRness]

you can dig up old computer parts and build your own router.

possibly cheaper than a hardware router, and worlds more configurable.

see freesco.org and coyotelinux.com for info on a couple of floppy distros.

of course, it's prolly easier to buy one, and takes up less space than another box.

also, if you've only got two machines, minimally you need an extra nic and you can just do internet sharing with a proxy or sumpin', which there are NHFs and prolly other documentation on somewhere.

[linlu]

Hi,
We have a linksys router at home (for cable/dsl) The biggest gotcha was that it only allows you to port forward 10 services and/or ports to a specific internal IP address TOTAL. This doesn't apply just to servers either. IN our case we had to add a forwarding rule for each machine that wanted to access our domino server back at work. Two machines accessing just one oddball server, ate up 2 of 10 allowed.

Our solution will be to setup a linux firewall as our external firewall and run servers we want to run off that ExternalDMZ. We'll also run another zone for our machines that need to access our work servers so that we don't eat up the limited forwarders on our linksys router. We'll keep the router, but it will be used only for machines that don't require access to the any special servers at work.

You might want to read the user's guide from the site's manufacturer. We did, but we didn't understand we needed the port forwarding until we tried to connect to our work domino server. I suspect this is because it our Domino server/clients use port 1352, which is not one of the ports standard services home users are expected to use (80, 443, 21, 20). You don't have to port forward any of these standard service ports.

Would we buy it again, yes. We're newer at the linux as a firewall thing than we are at the cable/dsl access thing, so we had no other choice at that time. When we build our new setup - dual 'firewalls', the router will still provide one more level of defense.
- linlu

[PhilB]

My router at home is an Athlon 550 with 128meg of Ram and runs Redhat 7 with ipchains and ipmasqadm - Very configurable, very easy to do, and ultra reliable...

I'd recommend it to anyone, over paying out a shedload for a solid state router, a machine can serve other purposes too - I host little bits on the web (just for personal use) and also use it as a test base for things I work on at work (through ssh and telnet) so I can test connectivity/functionality from home (ie, the outside world) too.

Just get a 486, packet filtering and routing isn't much of a strain hardware wise really.