Hotspot - hardware sizing question

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Perhaps someone could advise me…

I am trying to determine about sizing hardware for Hotspot.

Our current system has been in place for many years, using an old Dell 1 RU server.
We would like to retire this old dusty thing before the hard drive fails.
The current system is:
1 CPU 1.8 Ghz
2 GB RAM
(old) 80 GB Hard drive
average 5 to 8 % CPU utilization

The system has dual ethernet ports, no wireless interface.
Hotspot interface (Inside) is an inside Vlan with about 30 wifi access points.
Many users connect by “Trial” method. Many others authenticate to an external Radius server.
Hotspot DCHP Pool is a /23 subnet. Fairly high public turnover, There are lots of short period users come through our buildings.
DHCP Lease time 1 hour.

Typical:
Hosts: 250 to 300
Active: 100 - 150

Fairly simple configurartion.

Currently No Queues. Internet bandwidth is limited to 25 Mb/s by a different upstream router.
We may want to change this to an interface queue.
There are several items in Walled garden.
One Layer 7 firewall rule, trying to block torrents.

What Routerboard hardware would be appropriate for this application ?
Thanks !

Dean
(Yakco)

2

if your Dell server is doing it’s job correctly, you can keep it.

Advice: change your harddisk to a new one, or even better to a SSD. This will boost the speed dramaticaly. You do not need the same size disk, most of the times the old disk is not filled up.

Even if you want, you can keep both disks. One disk (SSD) for the OS and programs and the other (normal spinning HD) for user data etc…

3

Thanks. The server team has informed me that they will be retiring that Dell hardware. Keeping it is not an option. I figure I’ll order a RB3011UiAS-RM and see if that does the job. If not, I’ll use the 3011 somewhere else, and get CCR1009-8G-1S-PC for it.

Dean
(Yakco)

4

Let it be virtualized by your server team…