Back when i was on ADSL i used a Draytek Vigor 120. This is a dumb modem that translates PPPoE (set in your router) into PPPoA for your ISP.

There's a newer model, the DrayTek Vigor 130, that does ADSL, ADSL2+ and VDSL2 (FTTC).

For small, x86 machines, these look pretty nice. 4 Intel NICs, a J1900 Celeron (3x the speed of the CPU in Panda's Smoothwall machine), starting at ~£130. Just add RAM and storage and install pfSense or some other firewall OS.

For the wireless either the Ubiquiti Unifi APs already mentioned, or routers flashed with OpenWrt.

My network is currently powered by OpenWrt. Next month i'll be ordering one of those J1900 boxes and installing pfSense on it. Then my OpenWrt routers will be reconfigured to serve purely as access points (4 networks, each on their own VLAN). Further down the line i'll probably replace them with Ubiquiti Unifi APs.

In reply to a post by rhetherington:

Back when i was on ADSL i used a Draytek Vigor 120. This is a dumb modem that translates PPPoE (set in your router) into PPPoA for your ISP.

There's a newer model, the DrayTek Vigor 130, that does ADSL, ADSL2+ and VDSL2 (FTTC).

For small, x86 machines, these look pretty nice. 4 Intel NICs, a J1900 Celeron (3x the speed of the CPU in Panda's Smoothwall machine), starting at ~£130. Just add RAM and storage and install pfSense or some other firewall OS.

For the wireless either the Ubiquiti Unifi APs already mentioned, or routers flashed with OpenWrt.

My network is currently powered by OpenWrt. Next month i'll be ordering one of those J1900 boxes and installing pfSense on it. Then my OpenWrt routers will be reconfigured to serve purely as access points (4 networks, each on their own VLAN). Further down the line i'll probably replace them with Ubiquiti Unifi APs.

I'd be very interested to know how you get on with those Celeron J1900 / quad LAN boxes; I was going to get one, but opted for a cheaper mATX Core2Duo based old PC with an HP quad-port NIC. I'm also sticking to UniFi APs (well, one so far) on the wireless side, but I'm going to try Sophos UTM or XG for the firewall.

In reply to a post by sergiup:

I'd be very interested to know how you get on with those Celeron J1900 / quad LAN boxes; I was going to get one, but opted for a cheaper mATX Core2Duo based old PC with an HP quad-port NIC. I'm also sticking to UniFi APs (well, one so far) on the wireless side, but I'm going to try Sophos UTM or XG for the firewall.

Right after i ordered one of those J1900 boxes Ars Technica published an article on it.

I think the author of the article must have had a misconfiguration when using pfSense on his unit as i haven't experienced the same problems.

I did have a few problems though:

* Customs charge of £19. Expected, but annoying.

* The power supply blew on initial plug-in (loose solder) and local shops wanted between £30 (Maplin) and £45 (Currys/PC World) for a replacement. I ended up ordering one from Amazon for £12 (£8 + £4 shipping) and a spare from China for £4.50.

* My J1900 box ran pretty hot, idling at 65C. I replaced the thermal paste between the heatsink and chassis with Artic Silver and the thermal pad between the CPU and heatsink with a thicker, 1.5mm, Fujipoly one. It now idles at <45C.

These little boxes make great routers and i don't regret buying it, but i did end up paying more than i expected. With the box itself + customs fee + mSATA SSD + replacement PSU + thermal pad i ended up paying around £190 (and that's only because i had 4GiB of compatible RAM lying around).

CPU usage varies between 5-8% but i'm currently only running two additional packages (Avahi and pfBlockerNG blocking >100,000 ad domains).

For Wifi I'm using my old OpenWrt routers as pure access points. I am eventually planning on replacing them with Unifis but have decided to hold off until after Christmas.

In reply to a post by rhetherington:

* Customs charge of £19. Expected, but annoying.

How much was the "handling" levied by the Royal Mail or carrier? The rest, I assume would be VAT.

£19 was the total cost, not sure what the breakdown was. IIRC the carrier was DHL.

If it was DHL, you were lucky. They are apparently te cheapest when it comes to collecting VAT and duty payment. Yours will have been VAT only though. At a guess the device was around £55-60 plus £11-12VAT and £7-8 handling.

Cost of the PC was £130 (i think that was with shipping at the time i bought it, now it's an extra £13) so they probably marked the price down on the customs declaration.

If anyone else is looking at these the Qotom-310G4 might be a better bet. Slightly cheaper with newer Intel NICs and CPU (half the number of cores, but each core is twice as performant as those of the J1900). I *think* Qotom pre-pays any VAT and fees to the shipping company too.

I haven't seen any reports on how well pfSense runs on this newer model though, so if anyone picks one up and tries it post your experiences.

Prepay of customs/VAT will mean no fees paid to DHL though.

I use a J1900 (Asrock Q1900 DC itx).

For some reason they are way more expensive now than when new - I paid £78 + free delivery pre order on amazon - they are currently £118!

There are power state issues with Linux, but being headless + choosing right kernel can avoid. Uptime currently 202 days CPUs 39 degrees, max according to sensors is 105. I've never got above 68 when compiling stuff, there are no fans.

Of course I needed ram + a nas disk + case (used old netbook power block) The DC board will take 9-20v - I did have plans for a pico ups setup, but never got round to it. It's a PVR/TV streamer as well as a router/qos/firewall/server box with 2x DVB-T2 USB tuners and seems to have plenty spare CPU for what I use it for, it can easily max gig eth when copying stuff over.

Never did get round to getting a second nic for it - Open reach FTTC modem currently plugged into a switch. Not optimal WRT multicast but meh I'm stingy.

The recent DDoS attack has made me think a bit more about my requirements and whether they reflect the requirement not to be an anti-social "netizen".

I had been thinking that installing an up-datable router (e.g. OpenWRT compatible) and then using my old less secure modem/router (with wifi disabled) as a pure ADSL modem would give me the main elements that I was looking for. Certainly my gut feel is that your primary investment should be in the router.

Recent events however have me wondering about the wisdom of using the old modem/router as a pure modem on the outside of my firewall. Would it be visible and "recruitable" into a bot network? Is it "dumb" enough (or can it be made dumb enough) to be used outside the firewall?

I may have protected my internal network, but I won't have protected my bandwidth and data allowance and might still have an "anti-social" setup.

I guess buying something like the DrayTek Vigor 130 ADSL/VDSL Ethernet Modem gives me that extra protection, but is that essentially all that I get for the £85 cost?

Edited by deleted (Sun 30-Oct-16 12:05:37)