Routers and other networking kit.

H-Man

Enlightened
Joined
Aug 17, 2011
Messages
219
Location
CA
What do you run for a router?
pc180421.jpg

(Don't mind the tissue, I had glued some of the inductors to reduce coil whine and the glue was dripping somewhat, the tissue is there to catch the drips.)
I run a laptop with everything not important to running as a router removed (part of the case, the top half, keyboard, hard drives, CPU fans (replaced with that large heatsink in the picture,)) running pfsense off of a $5 flash drive. It is a hp pavillion dv8310us with an AMD Turion 64 clocked at 2.2 ghz, and 512 mb of ram. All the parts except for the flash drive and cooler, and knex pieces were acquired out of the electronic waste bins around town. I got the laptop from a computer repair shop because the CPU fan was siezed up, the repair shop thought it was a bad motherboard. The knex pieces are toys that I have had for 13 years, they are the go to for non conductive non magnetic structural materials when I need to build something. The cooler I got from a freebie from another forum.

This setup gives me the same performance on wireless as on wired in terms of latency.
I found that the system would crash with powerD (power management daemon) enabled unless I disabled ACPI throttling (ACPI throttling was attempting to run the CPU at 300 mhz even though it can only run as low as 800 mhz.)
I haven't had a chance to measure the power draw, but the heatsink is cold to the touch at the base.





I should note that most people would have difficulty maxing out a pfsense system with a Pentium III, but you want to find an energy efficient system for router duties, this one claims to be drawing 10w at idle.
 
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