Choosing a Router

By Jerry Pournelle

November 10, 2003

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Column 279 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Routers

If you have high speed Internet access, you need a router. It's your first and most important line of defense.

It doesn't have to be a very expensive router. The D-Link DI-604 we use is quite inexpensive and so far has performed splendidly. D-Link makes a whole line of comparable routers, including the DI-704P, which is similar to the DI-604 but with a printer connection: This router also works as a print server, so that all the machines on your system can access the printer connected to the router.

There is also the DI-804, which has VPN capability. VPN means "Virtual Private Network": It allows you to use the Internet to connect machines as if they were part of a local net, with 128-bit encryption to ensure privacy. I'll have a lot more about VPN another time.

Another step up might be the US Robotics USR8200 Secure Storage Router Pro. Compared to the DI-604 the USR8200 has a bit more sophisticated firmware for resisting internet attacks, but the big feature is that it has both USB and 1394 Firewire ports for attaching external storage devices. You can use those external disk drives for auxiliary and backup storage for the entire network: The router and external drives become a storage server. Clearly you can get the same capability (as we do here at Chaos Manor) by building a "box of drives" computer (we recommend either Seagate or Maxtor drives) and adding that to the network, but using the router and external drives is cheaper and may have other advantages. A large external drive makes for a good fast sneakernet: even with high speed Internet connections it's often faster to transfer 100 gigabytes of data by carrying a drive from one machine to another…

And we have the MultiTech RF600VPN RouteFinder, which is billed as an "Internet Security Appliance" because it's considerably more than a router. Its closest counterpart is the NetWinder, which you'll recall we used with great success for several years.

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