Best hardware for gargoyle?

[Stealthmatt]

Hi all,

I am currently looking for a router to use soley with gargoyle. About 100 users will be connected through the router, So i need a router that can hold its stance.

Cost is not an issue, which is the best and fastest hardware to use with gargoyle? Any recommendations? Advice etc

Thank you,

P.S. Please make quota shapping It would be an excellent feature on top of the already existing quota capping

Regards,
Matt

[DoesItMatter]

I doubt any home user based router will handle that load.

You would probably need an old machine that can be supported
fully by OpenWRT, and that would probably be able to be flashed
with one of the existing firmware images, or you would be doing
heavy modifications yourself.

Otherwise, you would need some big commercial router, which I
don't think can be flashed by Gargoyle either.

From what I understand, Eric is available for hire, so if cost is not
an issue, you could always hire Eric to build a custom one for
an x86 based machine and it would need a couple of Gigabit NIC's,
as well as 1 or 2 Wireless-G or Wireless-N adapters.

That would probably be your only REALISTIC way of getting that
to work properly. Most home-based routers usually support a
maximum of 10 people. The RAM and the CPU just cannot handle
any more of a load than that.

If you want more of an explanation on this - search the forums
over @ DD-WRT or google, you will find a LOT of questions about
this, and the answer is the same, an x86 based machine, or a huge
commercial router.

[FRiC]

Even huge commercial routers may not be able to handle 100 users. I had a little experience with apartment complexes with 100 or so users, and after a lot of trial and error, I found ALIX boards (besides a full x86 PC) with pfSense could handle the load.

I also had Gargoyle running on ALIX for a while but ran into some issues and have not had time to reproduce the problem.

[pbix]

I would say this would all depend on what those 100 users are doing and if they are all active simultaneously. Also it would depend on what the WAN bandwidth was.

The WRT54G-TM has 32Meg RAM and can handle up to about 20Mbps I would say. If your WAN connection is less than that it should work for you. I cannot see how the number of uses itself would be a problem.

[DoesItMatter]

Depends what the users are doing.

I had done some earlier torrent testing with a Fonera 2201+

8MB flash, 16MB ram, 200mhz AR2315 CPU (overclocked a little )

Anyway... with just me using the router, I had 4 torrents running

I downloaded the torrents for 4 dvd-sized linux distros and set them
to a max of 64kbps upload, but no limit on connections.

Across the 4 torrents, I hit 200 connections, and the router had
slowed to a CRAWL... I still had plenty of upload/download
bandwidth, but all those connections just killed the router.

Obviously the Fonera 2201+ is no powerhouse, but it was meant
purely as a test to show the # of connections can tax a router.

I'll need to re-try this test on a WRT54G-TM, and see what kind of
results I get as well. I suspect a bit more connections because
of the 8MB flash and 32MB ram, but its still only on a 200MHZ cpu
as well, so I'm guessing I'll bring it to a crawl at around 300+
connections, maybe upto 400 connections.

That being said, for 100 users, typically just 1 user can use 10-20
connections easily, and if all 100 were using it at the same time,
you'd be looking at anywhere from 1000-2000 active connections.

That poor WRT54G-TM would probably cry and throw a hissy-fit.