I'm looking to forward a lot of ports and our 'dumb' switches can't do it. So I'm looking to put something in front the The RB450G looks like an ideal choice, and more adapted than an atom based machine.

I'm looking to forward around 300 ports on different ip addresses, however I saw somewhere it had a limit of 32 rules ? Can I have others at non wire speed or is it just not possible ?

Thanks

What limit? 32 rules where? Uh?

This replyes you? xD

I'm looking to forward around 300 ports on different ip addresses, however I saw somewhere it had a limit of 32 rules ? Can I have others at non wire speed or is it just not possible ?

There is no any limit for RB450G.

The 32 rules is specifically for the switch chip (in some of the routerboard models) on-board rules. If you use the regular RouterOS rules, you're probably only limited by the memory and cpu and how efficiently you write the rules.

Thanks for the replies, it would make sense to put my most used rules on the switch and the rest via the cpu.

I know this is a vague question, and depends on the traffic streams, type etc... but would the routerboard be able to sustain 20-30mbps of traffic of traffic switched with a lot of forwarding rules depending on the ip / port.

Traffic coming in via the first port, and passed to the second port.

The switch chip is mainly geared to layer-2 stuff, and has pretty limited capabilities compared to the regular routerOS rules.

If they (mikrotik) approached the underlying implementation correctly (I don't know, but I would assume/hope so) since your forwards rely on IP address as well as the port, it should be able to handle 300 forwards just as easily 1 forward.

It should be able to handle 20-30mbit, unless possibly they are all small packets; or you have a bunch of additional rules, in which case it would depend.