I’ve been a bit confused on which model is right. I know they are both built on the same platform, but the 2011 has 2 switches whereas the CRS109 has 1.
I’ll likely just have a rather flat WAN/LAN setup. I might do a DMZ or segment off the wireless, and I know those will be subject to the router’s CPU performance. Apart from that though, 109 should give me wirespeed for all the LAN ports, correct (and so should a 125 if I wanted a switch with more ports)? E.g. Port 1 is WAN, ports 2-8 are LAN so communication between them will be at wirespeed (and GigE)? If I had a DMZ, then say port 1 is WAN, 2 is DMZ, then 3-8 would be the LAN (and those would run at wirespeed)?
On the WAN/routing side, my setup is 50mbit down, 6mbit up. I plan on having some generally basic firewall rules. I have both IPv4 and v6. v4 will likely NAT behind a single public IP (static), v6 will likely be global rules with some holes pokes in for things like SSH though I may look at more complex rules for P2P on the v6 side. QoS is, however, a big thing I’ll want to have on the WAN side.
In fact QoS (as well as raw wireless speeds) has me pondering the 2011/CRS109 over an ASUS RT-N66U. I do small LAN parties on a semi-regular basis and need something that can keep up with my 50/6 connection while keeping latency manageable when folks inevitably have to download things while others are playing latency-bound games.
I can’t say much about the RB, but the CRS is fast. Really fast. I don’t think losing out on the extra switch will hurt you. Wireless performance is excellent. The CRS should be able to handle a 50/6 connection easily (I push > 300mb through mine regularly with no issue). AFAIK there’s not much of a price difference either? (Twenty bucks by the RouterBOARD site)…
Cool thanks for the feedback! I ended up ordering a CRS109, yep. Seemed like the best fit since any step up was a big bump in cost that was hard to justify, and as you suggest, may be unnecessary. My only big concern was QoS. Curious if/how that might affect wireless performance is I’m expending CPU on doing QoS over the WAN interface. Actually not having 5GHz is a bit of a step backward there as well, but my thought is if I miss it, I can get a WAP separately, no big.
Cool thanks for the info! I ended up buying a CRS109. Gets here Friday, so I’m excited! As far as RouterBoard goes, seemed like the best buy since anything up from that either didn’t have integrated wireless (didn’t want to buy that separately, for now) or was pricey for what I wanted to do.
The only big concern I had was how having QoS on the WAN might affect things (like wireless performance). QoS is goal #1, though having a proper IPv6 stack (one reason I wanted to try out RouterBoard) is important too. Most of my actual IP filters will be pretty simple though.
Only other issue was the lack of 5GHz, but I figure I can always buy a dedicated WAP down the line if that’s an issue, no biggie.
I thought I would post an update now that I have things up an running. In short, I’m sold on RouterBoard! My only mistake was not trying it out far sooner!
So far I’m quite happy with the CRS109 and think it is a better fit for me than the 2011, largely due to the unified switch and the extra hardware switching options. The hardware QoS made a small difference in my WAN performance, though I will say the software queues is what really made things work well.
On my 45/5 setup with some basic iptables on both v4 and v6, along with some basic QOS (‘default-small’ for outgoing, ‘RED default’ for incoming seems to work well so far), the router has no problem keeping up with the throughput on the WAN and QoS has made a massive difference in latency. One problem I used to have was uploading a file via SSH while also using an interactive terminal (two different use cases over the same protocol). This now works wonderfully using the 109! I can also slam my network connection without largely affecting my friend’s League of Legends game. His ping times also dropped by a noticeable margin since I went with the 109. I was using an Apple Time Capsule previously along with a D-Link GigE switch, so I think removing those both from the chain is what likely helped there.
Wireless performance is quite good and, in fact, I ended up lowering my TX power quite a bit and still have full coverage. RouterOS gave me plenty of metrics for tuning that as well.
Setting up SNMP (for Cacti) was easy as well and, though I need to find the link for it, someone made some nice Cacti templates for some of the things not already covered by the included Cacti SNMP graphs. I have yet to install these since the CPU and port graphs were what I wanted most and they work “out of the box”.
All in all I love this little box! I would say it’s not powerful enough for the really high tier speeds, and this is already well known. But for my piddly 45/5 setup it works wonders. And if I ever upgrade to something better, you can bet I’ll be placing another RouterBoard behind it!