Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

See http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcxddbtr_23cg5thdfj for photo credits.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

As a result of my move, I am losing the NAT router w. wifi that I have been using for the past few years.

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.)