Hello all,
I'm contemplating buying a WNR3500L, and I'm hoping that somebody will be able to answer a few questions about it. My apologies if these should have been asked as separate posts (and for the vague title) - this is my first post here so I'm not quite sure what the done thing is.
1) First, this isn't directly related but I'm looking for advice on choosing an ADSL2+ modem - I'm in the UK so I would be using PPPoA, and I have a block of public IP addresses so I need it to act completely transparently without NAT or any other extras. Does anybody have any good experiences with devices that you can basically just plug in and forget it's there?
I have been using an old ADSL2MUE with the Routertech firmware running in half-bridge mode, but the ADSL2+ support is very flaky - much slower than I should be getting at my sync rate and it drops out a lot.
2) I'm currently using a dedicated Linux machine as my router, with my internal wired network configured to have two network ranges on the same physical segment. One is an internal range, and the router performs DHCP and NAT, but it's also configured to route to a block of public addresses for machines which are statically configured. This was a fairly simple setup using custom routing table and netfilter rules, so I presume I'll be able to do the same thing using any of the custom firmwares for the WNR3500L, but are there any obstacles I haven't thought of?
3) Is it possible to configure dual-SSIDs, to allow both public and private networks? I've found tutorials for multiple-SSID configuration using DD-WRT, but I don't know if that requires particular hardware or not.
4) It would be wonderful if I could plug a USB hub into the thing and connect several USB disks, then use ZFS-FUSE (or perhaps btrfs in the future) to present one gigantic virtual device and share it. Is this likely to be possible or is that going too far?
Thanks for reading all that - I'd appreciate any advice anyone might be able to give.
Answer:
1. I'm using a NETGEAR DM111P ADSL2+ Modem, by default it's only in Bridge Mode, where the router or pc runs the adsl connection. With a few tricks in can be converted into a adsl router. From my experience this modem works very well
2. I don't see any problem
3. With the wnr3500l and dd-wrt it is possible
4. If someone provides zfs or btrfs als a kernel module, or if you compile it yourself, this should be possible.
Thanks for the quick reply. I'll look into that modem - there seem to be numerous reports of successfully using it as a half-bridge, which is probably what I want. On the other hand there are some very negative reviews as well. Have you had any overheating issues?
Replying to myself: it looks like ZFS would be out of the question as the memory requirements are sadly far too high. Oh well.