using a RB3011UiAS-RM as a PPPoe server

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

Hi There,

I’ve been thinking of using one of these (RB3011UiAS-RM) as a PPPoe server to authenticate about 220 users … might increase to about 300 in the next 6 months or so.

Question is , any idea whether it’s big enough to handle that many sessions ? Or perhaps a better question , what’s the maximum recommended sessions for this unit?

Right now everything is running on a Centos 7 server with the Roaring Penguin PPPoE plugin , radius with a mysql backend which works pretty cool but I’ve realized that this
might turn out to be a rather complicated rebuild if I’m not around so the goal is to simplify things a little :slight_smile:

thanks in advance,

2

With PPPoE there are usually also queues involved, and I think that model is not going to cut it for 300 connections.

For this I would look into the CCR 1036, the ME model which has 16Gb RAM

3

What is the spec of your current server? May be worth just re-purposing the box and running CHR.

4

I’ve got 3011 running for almost year or so, as a PPPoE server, queues for each of 200-249 clients. (traffic up to 250-300mbps )
looking into cpu usage history tells that it’s saturation is about 30-50% not more, but it may be moments
when smthng maxes one core so I’d recommend 1100AHx4 it should be suitable for more demanding
job.
but I should note that I’m not doing NAT on this RB, its only pppoe/dhcp server with queues and some filters.

5

Hi Steve,

It’s got a Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v4 @ 2.10GHz (16 cores / 32) threads with 64gigs of Ram. I think it’s rather beefy but seems to get rather busy with the pppoe sessions judging from the stats provided by top. What’s CHR by the way ? Sorry for the noob question :slight_smile:

top - 19:48:25 up 167 days, 2:50, 4 users, load average: 5.05, 5.12, 5.17
Tasks: 898 total, 10 running, 888 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 1.1 us, 6.9 sy, 0.0 ni, 90.2 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 1.8 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem : 65858320 total, 52973184 free, 2732856 used, 10152280 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 23445500 total, 23445500 free, 0 used. 56874620 avail Mem

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
180 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 100.0 0.0 6488:39 ksoftirqd/21
2572 nobody 20 0 6448 1740 1612 S 12.5 0.0 11:01.62 pppoe
9220 nobody 20 0 6448 1688 1564 S 12.5 0.0 6:09.60 pppoe