Hi All,

I'm a self employed system admin/consultant based in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada.  All of my customers would be considered small businesses.  All of them are using Linux in some fashion.  I've used a few different routers with Open-WRT and would love one platform to standardize on.  Here is my wishlist:

• Fast CPU and more RAM:  Most of my customers are remotely managed.  For this, I use OpenVPN in combination with Shorewall Firewall.  None of the base consumer grade open sourceable routers have the beef to handle it with the exception of the ASUS WL-500G Premium.  Even this one leaves a little to be desired.  It has a MIPS32 processor at 266MHz.  The memory requirements are quite steep as well.  Using the conntrack feature of the 2.6 kernel is quite a memory hog.  The ASUS barely manages at 32M. 64M would be ideal.
• Crypto Accelerator:  This is more of a dream item.  If the CPU is fast enough to handle 25 or so simultaneous OpenVPN connections using AES-256, it's not really necessary.  Must have open source drivers available and work with OpenSSL and OpenVPN supporting AES256 and SHA512.
• Storage Subsystem:  The closest router I've tried that matches my requirements is the Microtik Routerboard 532a.  With this one you can leave the onboard flash alone and have the router boot from a CF card.  My dream would be dual SDHC slots with failover booting if desired.  They could be used for software RAID1 or RAID 0 or anything else you could dream up with the Linux RAID subsystem.  Besides the use as boot medium, it could also be used as storage for web/email proxy/virus scanner.
• USB 2.0:  A couple of ports would be nice.  Obvious uses are for NAS, serial ports or printer ports.
• Mini PCI:  One slot with removable wifi card.  Splurge and two would be even better.
• Antennas and connectors:  All should be removable with detachable ufl connectors to the wireless card.
• Ethernet: Two dedicated ports in addition to a four port vlan capable switch.  GigE would be nice for the NAS possibilities.

I would order a dozen of these for $150 and up, depending on features, as soon as I can find them.  I'd be happy to standardize all my customers on such a platform.  I'm sure they could be sold as a small business class VPN router such as Linksys does with various models.

Dreaming away patiently,

Jon