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Over the com­ing weeks I will be spend­ing one week each with a num­ber of PC-based router/firewall prod­ucts installed as the pri­mary NAT gate­way at my apart­ment. I will be review­ing them based on over­all per­for­mance, inter­op­er­abil­ity with my SIP-based VoIP ser­vice, QoS capa­bil­i­ties, VPN capa­bil­i­ties, and any extra fea­tures that make them stand out from the crowd.

The test plat­form will be a Dell Pow­erEdge SC430 with a 1.6 GHz Intel Xeon dual core proces­sor and 4GB of RAM. The cur­rent list of soft­ware to test is as follows:

• pfSense 1.2 (Stable)
• pfSense 2.0 (Alpha)
• Untan­gle Open Source 6.1
• Vyatta Com­mu­nity 5

I will also be test­ing “appli­ance” type routers based on what is avail­able to me, which cur­rently is as follows:

• Linksys WRT54GL (Linksys firmware 4.30.12)
• Linksys WRT54GL (Tomato 1.23)
• Linksys WRT54GL (DD-WRT v24 SP1 Mega)
• Linksys WRT54GL (Open­WRT Kamikaze 8.09)
• Cisco 1841 (IOS 12.4(23))
• Watch­guard Fire­box X Edge
• Edge­wa­ter Edge­marc 4500 (VOS 9.1.2)

The Watch­guard is cur­rently unknown due to not hav­ing the pass­word for it and I may cut down the list of Linksys firmwares, but all of the rest will be tested.

Hard­ware or soft­ware sug­ges­tions for fur­ther test­ing are appreciated.