FreeBSD Based Gaming Router 240
Zaphoid writes "Lan Game Reviews has posted an article on how to use an old computer and FreeBSD distro m0n0wall to create a gaming router. Gaming routers allow users to use their full bandwidth for downloads and other high bandwidth apps, and low latency applications at the same time. By keeping packet queues on the router side, rather than the modem side. Users are able to achive great pings in online games, while fully using their download bandwidth. This is a great alternitive to expensive gaming routers on the market today."
Re:Double standard (Score:5, Informative)
m0n0wall (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:pf.conf ruleset (Score:2, Informative)
That should do it. I've been using ack prioritization since a couple months after the artitcle was released. I've noticed recently that I still get good pings when torrenting and playing RTCW:ET.
Have fun.
Beware TPB
Re:pf.conf ruleset (Score:1, Informative)
i dont know example links, but let me give you some pointers.
think about the type of traffic thats bad for gaming and the type thats good.
make a queue for ack packets and traffic to known ports for your games, and give it higher priority, and then make a queue for ftp/bit torrent/http,etc and give it low priority.
if you google you can find info on ports that games like wow/counterstrike/doom/quake/etc use and play with it a bit.
also, make a queue for your gaming machine and give that top priority if that applies to you.
good luck hope this helps.
Why not use a switch? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:benchmarks please?? (Score:2, Informative)
there is a reason why these companies put R&D effort into making custom hardware for routers.. just becuase you can do the same functions in software doesn't mean its just as good.
Firmware? 66Mhz? (Score:3, Informative)
And That Old Pentium's 66Mhz backplane is so much more then enough to push around a cablemodem's maximum throughput.
If you actually read the article, you'd see that this is a distribution of one of the BSD's that is trimmed down and web-interfacified making it extremely easy to install and configure. Install two network cards, load up the CD, and you're pretty much good to go. I don't think installing some network cards is a big deal for a lot of gamers that build their own machines.
I hope he's better at programming then at hardware (Score:2, Informative)
Because there sure is a lot wrong with asking for a 486 DX2 133MHz. Ain't no such thing exist.
First, saying that the chip is a DX2 implies that the motherboard opperated at a 66MHz bus speed, which no 486 had the blessing to experience (66MHz bus speeds didn't happen until the Pentium line). The 2 in DX2 implied that the CPU operated at a frequency twice that of the bus speed (DX2 66MHz = 33MHz bus speed). There were certainly DX4s though, where the CPU frequency was 3x that of the bus speed (why it wasn't the DX3, I don't know). DX4 75MHz (25 MHz bus) and 100MHz (33MHz bus).
Second, the only chip manufacturer ever to release a 133MHz 486 processor was AMD (a true DX4, 33MHz x 4), and by that time, but the Pentium left all 486s in their dust. There was no market for it, and it was laid out to pasture. I doubt anybody still has one running. Well, perhaps except for these guys [totl.net].
Re:benchmarks please?? (Score:3, Informative)
Router is FreeBSD 4.11, PIII 450 with 2 3COM 3C905B's Around 1100 lines in ipf rule set. Not very well optimized, I have 1 group. I have NAT enabled, but this is not using NAT.
Does this help for some numbers?
The Real Issue.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Double standard (Score:2, Informative)
Evidently they do or there wouldnt be much of a market for higher preformance gaming routers with 200mhz processors and 32MB of ram
>we're talking about very meager amounts of data, very little CPU usage, and very little buffering.
You're deluding yourself, pushing the amount of packets you can over a decent broadband connection preforming address translation, and any kind of moderatly sophisticated firewalling or queueing is pretty intensive, the load can be minimized by using ASICs (and in the future linksys being now a subsidary of CISCO we may see this) but were talking a commodity embeded processor, and not very fast ones at that (the gaming routers are of course better but still no match for a full blown microprocessor)
>what do you think your $100 pentium II machine is? its mass produced too.
Sure its mass produced that was a poor selection of words on my part, its not an *emebeded* microprocessor though, with lower clock speeds, less cache, granted they are optimized for lower power consumption and heat there is no such thing as a free lunch.
>considering that linksys routers run Linux, there isn't anything you can't do with one of those that you could do with your stupid electricity hog, in terms of routing.
You can install a harddrive ? or do you like burning out flash drives/cards quickly ? I speciffically mentioned caching
I use what was at some point a HP pavillion with a
second generation celeron, running @ 500mhz with 256mb of ram saved from the trash (free) and a couple of intel 10/100 nics.($0.99 on ebay, shipping was $8) It has a 100 watt power supply, the chip has no fan on the heat sink the tiny power supply fan keeps it very cool, it has a harddrive a 4500rpm plain old ide harddrive. I would be willing to wager that it draws only slightly more power than one of those linksys gamming routers, and is at least twice as fast to boot. We have 5 very heavy computer users sharing a standard cable link, not once has anyone complained about slowness, even with 3 of them playing MMORPGs and two of those same idiots also using various P2P apps.
Re:benchmarks please?? (Score:3, Informative)
Who on earth said anything about it being faster? My guess is that the performance difference between dedicated hardware and PC is quite negligible. All the article said was that you can do quality-of-service queueing with regular PC hardware pretty easily, and that if you already have a spare PC, that's cheaper than buying dedicated hardware for the purpose. As far as I know, the article didn't claim that a PC was any better at the job than dedicated hardware; it just claimed that routing with quality-of-service is better than routing with it.
Getting back to the subject of performance for a moment, the low bandwidth involved in most home network connections (even if they are called "broadband") is so small that just about any computer that can run current software can handle it. Remember, computers are built to move hundreds of megabytes around in a second, and we are only talking about fractions of a megabyte.
That leaves only the issue of latency. But, on regular 10 megabit ethernet, a full-size 1536 byte frame can transmit in not much longer than 1 ms. Lots of fancy routing hardware is built so it can figure out how to retransmit a packet before the entire packet has been received, so a router could in theory add less than 1 ms of latency on 10 megabit ethernet. But even if your PC receives the whole packet and then waits a whole extra millisecond before starting to retransmit it, you've still only added 2 ms of latency, which is really not that much. At least, on my cable modem, if I ping the local university, my latency averages about 125 ms. How big of a deal is it if I had 2 ms to that?
For what it's worth, I just did two ping tests to test how much latency going through a PC does add. I first pinged the local university from my firewall machine, which is a 600 MHz Athlon running Solaris 8. The lowest ping time recorded was 9 ms. Then, I pinged the same machine from a Mac that sits inside the firewall, so that the Solaris 8 machine is routing the ICMP packets it was (in the previous test) originating. The result? The lowest ping time recorded for the Mac going through the Solaris machine was 9.178 ms. It's hard to say since the Solaris machine doesn't measure in fractions of a millisecond, but the point is that ping times were not increased dramatically. In fact, it appears to be less than one millisecond difference.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:wtf? (Score:3, Informative)
Stateful firewalls know all they need to know about TCP/IP to handle packets on a per-connection level. The game is running on another system, so the firewall need only needs to get a packet out onto the appropriate interface. I know PF can do this at the firewall level (see the fastroute keyword). Even if it does have to use the network stack (IPFW or IPF might not be able to route independantly, I'm not sure) FreeBSD can route packets very quickly[1].
"If you RTFA this "game router" is really only adding traffic shaping/prioritization, which is something a middle of the road router can do anyway in FIRMWARE which will be lots faster than that software."
Firmware is software that gets loaded onto a general purpose processor. Usually ARM or MIPS for broadband routers, IIRC. It doesn't matter whether it comes from an EEPROM, a flash memory chip, or a hard drive. Once it's in memory it's pretty much the same. The traffic shaping available with this will be a lot more configurable, and they wrapped the OS up into an easy-to-use distribution. It's not unusual for gamers to have unused computers sitting around, given their upgrade cycle, so it would be cheaper to use this if you have the hardware.
"Also you have to use good NICs (more $$$) on the old PC, which if it is an ISA bus PC good luck finding them, and if you find then you still got a 66MHz backplane in that old Pentium."
How many spare NICs do you have? Be honest. Until they started putting them on the motherboard most computers had one and whenever the computer died the NIC was always left over.
Pretty much any NIC will do for the purposes of broadband routing. The 66 mhz bus on a Pentium is also more than you need. A 486 can handle it. I've used a 486 with ISA NICs as a firewall on a cable modem with 5 megabits downstream bandwidth.
"There are lots of complexities here, it's not something your average gamer is going to build."
An easy to use package that runs on PCs a gamer already has? All they need to do is add a NIC or two? When they spend half their time putting in new video cards and RAID arrays on their other PC? When it'll save them enough money to get more game hardware? Sounds pretty plausible to me.
1 - http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/FreeBSD-5.3-Netw
Try openwrt (Score:4, Informative)
It's the most open of the alternativesd, last I looked. Not necessarily great for the lazy, though, since it will want some hand-configuring.