Router for Virgin Media cable connection

[burble]

Friday next week I'm having my Virgin Media cable modem upgraded to 50Mbit and in the process am saving the company the princely sum of £1/month. Bargain.

At present I'm using a Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato and until about 3 months ago it had performed flawlessly but lately it seems to get its knickers in a twist and stops routing. I can fix it by logging into the web interface and doing an release & renew of the WAN IP address but it's not ideal because I've got a Slingbox at home and it's a pain when the router throws a hissy fit and I can't watch the Slingbox from whatever crap hotel I'm in. I could schedule a reboot but I'd rather solve the problem than work around it.

I've seen reports that despite having a 100Mbit WAN port the WRT54GL won't give more than about 30Mbit so I'm looking for a new one.

Virgin Media will give me a router as part of the installation but I need nice things like PAT, bandwidth monitoring and so on so whatever thing they supply won't be of much use.

Any suggestions? I like the way Tomato is extremely easy to configure so I'm wanting to keep something GUI based if possible. I could use one of the spare Cisco 1712's or similar that I've got at work but away from work I don't want to faff about if I want to change an ACL or whatever.

I'm not fussed if it has GigE or 10/100 LAN ports, wireless or not because I've already got other equipment in place doing that stuff.

I've got a PIX501 sitting idle at home but that baulked at the 10Mbit I originally had from Virgin. Maybe I'll give that another try first of all.

[gss03]

Draytek 2930Vn would do the job if you've got the money to spend.

[burble]

A friend has offered to loan me his surplus 2910VG so I'm going to grab that and see how it works. I've never been a fan of Draytek kit but it is a few years since I've used one.

[darkghost]

Why don't you try setting up a Smootwall box after your cable modem? IIRC the latest version has PAT and bandwidth control - you can then connect any router you like after that.

[alsenior]

+1 on the smoothie route i think im reinstalling mine soon because i miss all of the stuff i used on it.

[burble]

I could do (and have used Smoothwall in the past) but I don't want another PC running 24/7.

[aidanjt]

You don't need a whole PC. Even an Intel Atom ITX board would be overkill, some little VIA C3/7 box will do the trick just fine.

[watercooled]

You can even get pre-assembled kits: http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12317 that one comes with m0n0wall but you could remove that and use smoothwall. That retailer also does boards etc - the ALIX boards are ideal for the job.

[i4000]

The one that Virgin gave me is a Netgear WNR2000 (http://www.netgear.com/Products/Rout...s/WNR2000.aspx), I haven't tried modding it myself but it appears to be listed on the OpenWRT hardware list (albeit a WiP).

Edit: Just read into it a little more, and the current support is not great, probably not suitable for general use (https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=18279)

[burble]

I'm using the Netgear WNR2000 that VM supplied. The Draytek wouldn't give more than about 2600KB/s but using the Netgear I got an average of 6059.75KB/s from a newsgroup download.

The lack of PAT and VPN endpoint is a problem but it'll do for now. When I'm back from holiday I'll have a look at one of the ALIX board based systems.