i am looking around for quiet some time now to gather information what hardware works and which does not. my intention is to build a router based on pc hardware and intel P4 2GHz and better cpu. i am aiming for reliability rather than the latest technology. the router should handle 8 R52 on 2 rb14 or 1 rb18 and one rb44 or rb44g. an other version should handle 2 or 3 rb44(g). does anyone have such a system working and which mainboards (brand, type/model…) are good for that ?
currently i have 2 RB500 (64mb Ram 399MHz CPU) with 4xR52 and 2xCM9 which can’t handle the load at all. high ping times and cpu at 100% for hours at peak time.
okay, that list is pretty useless for me. i can see most is running with beta software or ethernet on the intel boards is not recognized. i am looking for something more substantial. i have no intention on putting unstable equipment in a productive environment.
is nobody running hardware which is working stable and is not discontinued by the manufacturer ? i would really appreciate any report of working hardware.
I think anything post P4 era or post PCI-e have problems. Possibly RouterOS doesnt have the PCI-e to PCI bridge that many motherboards now use.
"is nobody running hardware which is working stable and is not discontinued by the manufacturer ? " ← that’s a tought one because it’s all been discontinued. I think Intel made the 865 boards many years past its time, but possibly those are gone now too. RouterOS really needs to get the right PCI drivers working so these new boards work. Part of the problem is Intel also - they’ve moved to some new IOAT reference which is a little weird, even in Windows.
thanks for your input changeip, i can see what you mean. and that is exactly my concern. i can get old server easy and for no money at all (compaq, hp, ibm and co.) but they usually don’t boot any IDE/ATA devices as they would have SCSI raid. also their processing power comes by 4 or more CPU’s which are not supported in the stable ROS branch. i tried very hard on a compaq DL580 without success. the main reason i want to use a PC based router is the performance and the ease of replacing defective radios (RB500 housing is a disaster to work on). the RB532A is running at 100% almost for 6 -8 hours without ANY firewalling and fancy stuff. 6 radios of which are all backhaul links, two with nstream (the others have StarOS at the other end). the overall throughput is maybe 10-12mbit/s. i have the impression that this lac of processing power is limiting the throughput. i have found a motherboard of supermicro PDSMA PD/P4 E7230 which has 5 pci slots. i would like to buy that but i don’t want to waste money in hadware which is not supported. i don’t mind not using sata, but i would like to be able to take advantage of onboard ethernet controllers.
i guess i just have to try. but i still welcome ANY input regarding PC based hardware.
Jan
PS. is there any way of over clocking the RB500 ? i mean more than 399MHz ? i don’t mind putting a fan and a heat sink somewhere.
what i mean is, useless for me as a source of information in the sense that i would know what to buy. at least at this stage with almost no information in the list.
We have 2 of these running as border routers. I do not know about wireless on them, but I assume they would be perfect. They use the PDMSi boards. This is an older system but still seems to be mfg’d possibly.
but in the meanwhile i have ordered 10 Compaq mainboards with i845 chipset from ebay. just to be on the save side. if they work with wireless its okay. i can not see that we need more CPU power. i am going to use celeron 2GHz and 512mb ram. unfortunately i need a graphics adapter for that board but thats okay too. the whole thing goes into a 4U 19" enclosure with 2 RB14 and one RB44. i am hoping to get 8 radios (R52 or CM9) going in that box for backhaul links.
I found this motherboard and really want to use it for our setup of OSPF full duplex wireless. curently we are using routerboard 532 and the cpu load is at 100% looking for a bigger cpu.
How do i know if this motherboard will work.
It dose have a dc/dc power built in and two mini pci ports, it aslo has a cf drive slot.
I am looking at an enbeded processor intel core solo Ultra low voltage 1.33 GHZ it power consumption is 5.5W
The tec said that it should be ok to use in a sealed case.
This is an excellent motherboard (well, i use the mp945-vdr from aopen). I have this 945GM chipset in my truck, if I can run Mikrotik on it I will test it out soon. I would need to take out the HD so I dont lose my settings. I have a rb532 in my truck so I don’t need to use this for RouterOS, but for testing I might just try it. It’s 150-160F in my truck sometimes and its running Windows XP fine…
dose your motherboard have 2 mini pci ports built in? thats what i am looking for. i have a full duplex conection set up but i need something with a bigger cpu than the rb532.