Routers and P2P

[Pyrotechnic]

I run Bittorrent and eMule on 2 machines on my network. I notice that sometimes it really tends to bog down the network, not because i'm getting blinding fast download rates, but because theres more connections that my router can handle. My router is a Netgear RP614 v2 with the latest firmware. Before I flashed the firmware it would crash about every 10 min. Now it does not crash, but the internet connection can get slow sometimes.

I was thinking about building a small minimalist system and running a minimal version of linux on it. Years ago I used an old K62 300 system and ran smoothwall on it and that was my router. Later on I bought a real router switch combo, just because it was more compact, consumed less power, quiter, etc.

So should I build my own router ? I have the most of the parts to build a small and quiet celeron 600 setup.

[Angry_Steel]

Set the maximum connections lower. And lower the amount of new connections that the programs can make in a timeframe. Easy in E-mule, not sure about bittorrent.

[re3dyb0y]

Changing the Router MTU setting can also help

[Pyrotechnic]

Well I figured and give it a try. I put together a Pentium II 333 with 128MB ram on an old mobo tray to test it out. I installed smoothwall on it and it seems to handle the load a lot better. If I decide to keep it, I plan to build a small case for it.

[gmat]

yeah most routers are already "minimalist" linux systems anyway, only difference is they come in rather small boxes You can even run bittorrent on it, also bittorrent has options to limit the global bandwidth.

[Pyrotechnic]

I'm liking the flexibility of my own router though. The netgear router I had, the config page was limited to what your average joe would understand. Smoothwall is a bit more flexible though.

I'm looking into m0n0wall right now. Seems it offers even more flexibility, and I can fit it on a small compact flash card instead of using a hard drive, so that would cut down on some noise and power consumption.

[gmat]

Indeed. What do you think of BusyBox + Embedded Linux ? It fits in a small flash memory. I have this in my USR router, it uses iptables though, quite a pain to configure.

[Pyrotechnic]

Busy box seems more for a strictly embedded system, although I do need minimalist software because I'm planning to use a CF card, which you should set to read only, or only have it written to during config changes since CF cards only have a limited amount of erase cycles. Running logging or having a swap partition means certain death for the card. m0n0wall seems to be just the ticket I need. It's pretty minimal, designed for CF card use, but it still has lots of features and seems pretty easy to use.

Now the next task is a make a case for it. I'm thinking about just trimming that motherboard tray down and building a box around it with sheet metal. I would use a regular ATX case but that would make it much bigger than it really needs to be, since i'm using a tiny PSU, and have no drives at all.

[TerraMex]

just an addendum : some ISP's actually do traffic shaping. Disruption of p2p "networking".

[bobo5195]

you can boot linux on linksys routers real easy. It might be the easier option.

I used to use ipcop (smoothwall fork) and that ran fine it was fast and effective. Remember to use something like wondershaper or at least some QOS stuff. It will seriously help.

[hey_allen]

You might take a look at m0n0wall. it's a lightweight BSD firewall/router distro.

I run mine on an old HP point of sale terminal with an 8mb flash card boot drive. almost completely web administered, with only inital device setup required to be attached to the system.

A friend was using a linksys router and was bogging it with P2P, much as was mentioned above, which prompted him to try this.

Also, if you have a craving to play with non-x86 hardware, it's built for ARM processors as well, if I remember correctly. Another friend is running his router on a Soekris(sp?) single board computer.

http://m0n0.ch/wall/