Linksys Begins Shipping The WRT1900AC

[Raven3x7]

That looks ancient....
And I don't mean its physical style.

Did you really read the specs? In any case it is not ancient and it's also far more powerful than most home routers(software wise).

[Serge]

pfsense appears to be a bsd-based competitor to the likes of openwrt/ddwrt?

I wouldn't describe it as intended to compete with OpenWRT or DD-WRT. From https://www.pfsense.org/about-pfsense/index.html:

This project started in 2004 as a fork of the m0n0wall project, but focused towards full PC installations rather than the embedded hardware focus of m0n0wall.

I run pfSense on an old PC that's got a Pentium 4 and 512 MB of RAM with seven ethernet interface by way of expansion cards.

[droidhacker]

Did you really read the specs? In any case it is not ancient and it's also far more powerful than most home routers(software wise).

Yes I did read the specs.
2.4 GHz 802.11N.
600 MHz.
What is this? 2005?

Software wise, who cares? Openwrt or don't waste my time.

[droidhacker]

I wouldn't describe it as intended to compete with OpenWRT or DD-WRT. From https://www.pfsense.org/about-pfsense/index.html:

Just because it doesn't NAME its competitors, does not mean that it doesn't have any. Their description is basically that they are targeting the same as openwrt and ddwrt. The only real difference that I can tell from their descriptions, is that its on BSD rather than Linux.

As far as being "focused towards full PC installations rather than ... etc." -- the right way to read that is "limited to full PC installations".
This limitation is, of course, caused by their use of BSD. As nice as BSD can be, it really doesn't draw many hardware vendors, so the actual hardware support is really lacking there.

Frankly, I can't see a single thing that pfsense claims to do that can't be done just as easily with openwrt. Openwrt, of course, has far far greater hardware support, and can run pretty much anything that depends on Linux.

[caligula]

Did you really read the specs? In any case it is not ancient and it's also far more powerful than most home routers(software wise).

I thought this article was about 802.11ac routers, not 802.11n crap. 802.11n is ancient. For what it's worth, I've already had two 802.11n routers, one with 4 x gigabit ports and one from Buffalo with 4x100Mbps. The last 802.11n one was a TP-Link from 2011. The Buffalo was probably from 2008 or 2009. Couldn't care less about 802.11n.

[caligula]

Just because it doesn't NAME its competitors, does not mean that it doesn't have any. Their description is basically that they are targeting the same as openwrt and ddwrt. The only real difference that I can tell from their descriptions, is that its on BSD rather than Linux.

As far as being "focused towards full PC installations rather than ... etc." -- the right way to read that is "limited to full PC installations".
This limitation is, of course, caused by their use of BSD. As nice as BSD can be, it really doesn't draw many hardware vendors, so the actual hardware support is really lacking there.

Frankly, I can't see a single thing that pfsense claims to do that can't be done just as easily with openwrt. Openwrt, of course, has far far greater hardware support, and can run pretty much anything that depends on Linux.

Well it boils down to the fact that BSD is ideologically more free and better if you don't like the toenail eating RMS cult. Some people valuate capitalism over communism.

[Ansla]

Lol! But seriously, I wonder why they thought it needed 1.2 Ghz, 128 MB flash, and 256 MB ram? DD-WRT Mega, the largest one, runs marvelously on a WRT54GS with just ~200 Mhz, 8 MB of flash and 32 MB of RAM.

How well does lighttpd serving ownCloud run on that WRT54GS? Because it runs like crap on a WNDR3800 with 680 MHz, 16MB flash and 128MB RAM. I managed to squeeze lighttpd and its dependencies in the 16MB flash, but owncloud itself is on an external drive along with the data it's hosting. The specs of WRT1900AC sound a lot closer to what it's required to host ownCloud, though probably still not enough.

[droidhacker]

Well it boils down to the fact that BSD is ideologically more free and better if you don't like the toenail eating RMS cult. Some people valuate capitalism over communism.

I think that your ideological interpretations are a bit... confused.

As a *capitalist*, I'll choose GPL to protect my own source code, because the purpose of sharing the code is to obtain free labor in advancing the development of that code. I certainly don't want to share code for free to my competitors without getting anything back in exchange for it.

BSD is the communist license, because you are giving your hard work away for free and not getting anything valuable in exchange for it.

[droidhacker]

How well does lighttpd serving ownCloud run on that WRT54GS? Because it runs like crap on a WNDR3800 with 680 MHz, 16MB flash and 128MB RAM. I managed to squeeze lighttpd and its dependencies in the 16MB flash, but owncloud itself is on an external drive along with the data it's hosting. The specs of WRT1900AC sound a lot closer to what it's required to host ownCloud, though probably still not enough.

owncloud does look pretty heavy. Lots of encryption and data processing. I'd say that you really need to use something that is more of.... an actual server for that.

I generally wouldn't consider any of these network appliances, including WRT1900AC, to be for much more than channelling data. Leave the heavy processing to equipment that is suited for it.

... although I do like the idea of having USB3 and SATA on the router, paying an extra $200 for that just isn't worth it. I'd much rather just pick up a cheap NAS. You can get an empty 2-bay NAS for $90, which puts you ahead of the game, since you get TWO SATA ports, an enclosure, and a power adapter. As far as the utility of having SATA on the device, it certainly doesn't save you any complexity in the system to use that over an NAS. In the end, it really isn't just a difference of $110, because you still need a powered enclosure for the SATA disk (which only holds *one* disk). Whether it communicates with the router using SATA, USB, or Ethernet is irrelevant.

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=27_1035_357&item_id=058795

[caligula]

owncloud does look pretty heavy. Lots of encryption and data processing. I'd say that you really need to use something that is more of.... an actual server for that.

I generally wouldn't consider any of these network appliances, including WRT1900AC, to be for much more than channelling data. Leave the heavy processing to equipment that is suited for it.

... although I do like the idea of having USB3 and SATA on the router, paying an extra $200 for that just isn't worth it. I'd much rather just pick up a cheap NAS. You can get an empty 2-bay NAS for $90, which puts you ahead of the game, since you get TWO SATA ports, an enclosure, and a power adapter. As far as the utility of having SATA on the device, it certainly doesn't save you any complexity in the system to use that over an NAS. In the end, it really isn't just a difference of $110, because you still need a powered enclosure for the SATA disk (which only holds *one* disk). Whether it communicates with the router using SATA, USB, or Ethernet is irrelevant.

http://www.canadacomputers.com/produ...item_id=058795

I think there are few fundamental issues that make such integrated router/file servers bad:

• Performance: NFS is fast, but CIFS and AFP require more CPU power. These are underpowered even if they don't do anything else but serve files.
• QoS: I mean this on whole system level. File serving uses so much resources the routing will slow down.
• File system support: usually only FAT32. A file server should use ZFS or Btrfs or something similar nowadays.
• File system security: you might want AD & ACL & more advanced stuff and not a FAT32 disk with full r/w access on filesystem level
• User level security: usually a separate page in the web gui. Terrible. How are the passwords stored? No idea. Maybe plaintext
• Backdoors: Many routers have hidden backdoors.
• HW security: WEP/WPA/WPA2 are all broken. Takes less than 2 minutes to break in via Wifi. I don't like this
• Scalability: The routers don't scale to larger home networks. They usually argue that it's good enough if you want to r/w a fat32 volume to everyone. I don't like this. Buy a NAS instead or use esata/usb/firewire disks. USB3 is fast enough.
• HW design: Indeed hot-plug might not work, how about RAID, powering disks with external PSU, and many bad ideas

I recommend this for home networks: ASRock C2550D4I Mini ITX & Intel Avoton C2550 integrated CPU. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157419
If you want ultimate security, set up Kerberos on RPi and so on.