In light of the recent video (which was great btw) i'd like to get a poll going of what the community's router of choice is. I personally use IPFire, i like that it's a distro created by a german team and is highly regarded for it's security, though the lack of granular control leaves a bit to be desired.
What kind of router are you using? Why do you like it? Does it have disadvantages or advantages you'd like to share?
I use pfsense (obviously) thanks to the teksyndicate video from way back. I used to use openwrt before that but pfsense allowed me to do much more.
What I like: Mostly the stability, I don't have to be rebooting things all the time. The firewall (once you get the hang of it) is really good and easy to get set up the way you like while still allowing for very complicated configurations.
What I don't like: a few of the packages have broken or changed the way they function on me which was annoying and there isn't really a good way to fix those kinds of problems other than either rolling back or submitting it as a bug. If you start messing around with things outside the gui bad things can happen and a lot of the time user changes will revert anyway.
I tried switching to pfsense a few months ago, but i found that it would disconnect my game session whenever i tried to play BF4 with friends after a few minutes. That and an overly complicated way of port forwarding to my internal servers made me switch back to IPFire.
In hardware? Hardware is mostly irrelevant in this case, with the exception of DD-WRT the distributions listed are hardware agnostic. I'd say this firmly sits in the software side of networking since we're talking about the specific unix-based distribution people are using for their personal firewall.
it does the job but is not very effective. One gripe i have is it doesnt show the ip address of the connected devices (shows the static but not the dhcp)
Moved it back into Networking software. The initial post and conversation ensuing is 100% software, so its in software.
I really like PfSense. I've been running it for a very long time now, and I've found it very well suited to my needs. I don't need a ton out of it, just a very consistent Router that needs very little maintenance. My uptimes are identical in length to the time between PfSense updates, because I never have need to restart it other than to update. Its great. I've got it paired with a Ubiquiti AC Lite for wireless, and a couple switches thrown around to get the mess of wired connections in my home running smoothly. Can't say enough nice things.
PFSense. On this. Just downgraded to 2x4GB ECC 1333 DDR3 that I had lying around. Might want to use the 8 gig sticks for something else. But even now 10% RAM usage... so overkill status is still intact. :P
Also OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT1900AC as wifi AP. Might switch to DDWRT, will see...
Lol my PfSense box has 2GB ram and it runs at less than a GB continuous use. Its super easy on resource usage, which is awesome. I've got my running on a quad core celeron that's like 15watt max power usage and passive. No issues, no slowdowns, and no issues with a 90/10 connection.
As I said: Overkill. ;) Or let's say it is made to last. I am on 100/40 right now but even more than gigabit wouldn't be a big problem, I'd just drop in 10GBit NIC and have the modem separate again. :D
I use Pfsense for my router which has served me fairly well without too many hiccups other then ones that I create myself. Overall its been running almost non-stop for 3 months straight, crashed due to a stupid experiment I was doing :P but was fixed fairly easily. At the moment I am running Unbound for DNS caching, NTP, pfBlocker (though with mixed success as I am still learning), and eventually Squid/Snort once I do some more reading/experimenting. It handles my 100/100 connection and is super stable, glad I chose to build my box and learn more about networking.
If we're talking home use routers, I'm not surprised. Meraki equipment price and licensing is expensive for just a home setup. I personally am running PfSense for my router, using squid proxy, and DD-WRT as an access point.
