At my new house Comcast is just giving me a cable modem. (I may try to swap boxes, but they probably won't let me get away with it.) (This surprised me: I did not know there were naked cable modems available any more.)
So, I am shopping. Any recommendations?
I know: I should just take one of my old machines and install the latest flavor of open source router. But (1) I'm lazy, and just want this to work, and (2) I don't have any machine younger than 2000 with slots for a second network card, and don't feel like shopping for USB NICs and ... and ... (As I have mentioned before, I went almost a decade without buying a desktop PC, laptops only, although I did give in and buy a cheap desktop last year.)
The usual shopping list:
* NAT
* wifi - nice, but I have some old wireless routers that I can use. still, it's nice to9 have just one box. (For various reasons, I don't want to use those wireless routers to connect to the net.)
Since I am shopping around, I might as well look for something that is on my wishlist: stats.
Basically, I would like the router to keep a reasonable amount of local stats. Enough so that I can document what percentage of the time I and what percentage of bandwidth up and down I spend VPNed to MIPS, so that I can at least deduct that from my income for tax purposes. (Perhaps if it's a high enough percentage, I can pay for more bandwidth, and get better Skype to you, Mike.)
Not necessarily a full connection log, although that would be nice if there was enough storage.
But at least
* total packets/bytes up/down
* total packets/bytes to a few IP addresses I identify
* total packets/bytes by IP for some selection of the top few IP addresses (not explicitly identifed)
* total 1minute time intervals in which there is any traffic, and/or any traffic to those IPs identified above
* histogram of those intervals by time of day and day of week
With reasonable ability to download automatically, so that I can keep the stats on another machine.
(Lower priority: VPN in the router: I have thought about tunnelling everything from my house router to Dreamhost for 20$ a month. Mainly so that I also get VPN that I can use while travelling. VPN in the router attractive so I don't need to configure it on Sophie and Rhonda's machines, etc.)
