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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

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tyingq·

Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter Lite is a popular, fast, cheap (<$100), solution in this space.

People are running FreeBSD and Linux on it:

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2016-01-10-FreeBSD-EdgeRoute...

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MIPS/ERLite-3

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One note is that it's my understanding that running Linux or even FreeBSD will mean that you can't hit 1Mpps if that's important to what you're doing.

The driver for the network offload is proprietary, however the pre-installed OS is Debian Linux with a fork of Vyatta.

Excellent point. I should have been more specific.

Can 2nd that its a very powerful and cheap router that could solve all my needs out of the box. Like routing my tv through a vpn etc.

So you go through all that trouble and end up with a terribly slow NIC, a "grownup" OS to maintain and the shitbox MIPS architecture to boot? What a pain. These MIPS boxes have their place, and that's squarely in the OpenWRT / system builder niche.

With the electricity prices the way they are in the US, no way I'd run something like that over a proper x86 as in the article that can saturate a 1Gbps and manage decent disk IO.

>>a proper x86 as in the article that can saturate a 1Gbps

"x86" covers a lot of ground. Certainly, in the "about $100" range, your choices in X86 land can't saturate 1Gbps either. The x86 box in the article was $280 total. About the same cost as the logical upgrade to the EdgeRouter Lite...their ER-8, which can saturate 1Gbps, and has 8 ports.

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