I've been having trouble managing my bandwidth between http and torrent downloads and general browsing because of the cheap Netgear DG834GUv5 router that came with the adsl package I signed up for. While asking around for a solution I came across the idea of building a software router from the old but unused PentiumIII PC I have laying around which would be more than enough. The only problem is after some searching on google I'm starting to get the impression that such a thing is pretty much a thing of the past and that I should just fork out the cash for router upgrade. Question? Is a software router still a better option if the hardware and electricity cost is no concern? If so, should the software router connect directly to the phone line with some kind of modem card or does it have to connect to the hardware router using a simple network card when connecting to the internet on an ADSL line?
Hey, Smoothwall is a firewall/router package that can be installed on a p111 machine with two network cards. Smoothwall provides plenty of administration features, whilst being a decent security solution as well. in regards to your questions A) not neccersarily it depends on your needs. B) You'll still need a modem to convert the singnals for transmission over the phone line.
VYatta is not strictly a software router, by definition VYatta is a Linux distro you can run VYatta as a software router in a VM but that defeats the object in my opinion, for a real software router look at Nat32.com
PFSense works very well. http://www.pfsense.org/ supports everything QOS, Proxy, Load Balancing etc, DHCP, Captive Portal for wireless, VPN etc.
I personally Use a software firewall for my network. They are cheaper and you have alot more control over them then hardware routers. Mine Consists of Linux running iptables,dnsmasq and a Wifi card put into Master Mode.
