[ubuntu-za] Which ADSL router?

[Matthew French]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:33 AM, Anton May <antonmay at gmail.com> wrote:

> If you are looking for a decent router, then a Netgear is a good option.
> If you are looking for stabillity and worth every penny, maybe a Mikrotik,
> but that is a bit of an overkill.
>
> D-Link are still good routers, so I would suggest get another D-Link
> router. User friendly and easy to setup.
>

Since this is an Ubuntu forum, I feel it would be appropriate to also
suggest the option of buying an ADSL modem and hooking it up to your Ubuntu
firewall... :-)

But to be honest I think it is hard to buy a bad ADSL router these days.
They all seem to be chock full of features you will never need, and can do
what you will need more than adequately.

If it helps, I have an 11 year old Netgear which is still going strong. I
only recently retired it because it doesn't support ADSL2 or WPA2. Sadly I
have been told the newer Netgear products aren't as robust. Ask me in 11
years which are today's reliable brands... :-(

Finally, just to make the case for running a firewall from your home server
- if you have one:
1. Even old PC's tend to have much faster processors than little routers,
and so will be more responsive.
2. PC's have hard drives, so you can run squid and cache all those updates.
3. Linux (or BSD) distros receive patches more quickly and transparently
than proprietary routers.
4. PC based routers are a lot more flexible, for example: allowing you to
install packages that show network traffic. Or configure Upside-Down-Ternet
(http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html)

For bonus points you can run the firewall in a virtual machine so you don't
have to expose the rest of the server to the outside world.

Of course the downside is it requires quite a bit of knowledge about
networking and will take some fiddling to get right. I obviously wouldn't
recommend this for the average home user. But it is a nice project for an
enthusiast.

- Matthew
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