On Sat, Dec 14, 2019 at 04:55:55PM +1100, Brian May wrote:
My theory is that with a bridged/PPPOE setup I was getting a lot of queuing of outgoing packets, which led to large latencies, and that the routed setup is better. I did try solving this by setting up QOS, but with the speed changing so much this didn't work anymore, and I don't particularly want to have to keep monitoring this.
I never noticed anything like that with my bridged pppoe connection (also using a very old billion modem). I always had good performance. Was getting almost 16 Mbpbs down and 1.1 Mbps up until about a year or so ago when NBN contractors came to prepare the street for NBN (FTTC). They negligently disconnected me twice while doing that (several days outage both times). After that, I never got better than 11 Mbps down. Coincidentally, that was just good enough that I couldn't insist that it be fixed. what kind of cpu did your linux router have? what else was it doing? my pppoe box was running on an AMD Phenom II 1090T, which was running lots of other stuff (apache, squid, bind, nfs, samba, asterisk, kvm, docker, gitlab, fail2ban, and more). Did you reduce the MTU and MRU to account for the pppoe overhead? i had mine set to 1412. BTW, you also have to set the MTU on all machines behind the pppoe router - if they send 1500 byte packets to the router, they'll just be fragmented anyway. I'm no longer using PPPOE. I switched to NBN in Sep. I'm now using the same NIC that was plugged into my modem for my NBN link. It has no problem handling 100/40 NBN.
My Cisco 877 is past end of life[*], so would like to replace it with something more recent (and capable of NBN speeds for when I eventually get FTTN). Currently looking at the Cisco Rv134w-e-k9-au it appears it supports things like DHCPv6 PD. Apparently it is suppose to be able to cope with NBN 100/40 speeds (confirmation of this would be good...). One review says it requires regular reboots. It also doesn't run IOS - although if it does what I want that isn't a big concern. Might be better actually, looks like firmware updates can be downloaded free of charge.
IMO, you'd be much better off with a good 2nd NIC in your linux box, and have linux handle the routing, firewalling, etc. a cheap realtek nic like mine(*) would do, or use something better like an intel or broadcom. the higher end models of cisco and other brands of dedicated routers have some advantages with extremely large networks and complicated routing tables, but none at all for a small or medium-sized LAN. In fact, they're at a disadvantage because they have such under-powered (and over-priced) cpus in them. even a recent model home router (tp-link, asus, netgear, etc) running openwrt/lede would be better. i'm tempted to get one of these myself now that I no longer need ADSL, so that I can separate my server from my gateway box. (*) this machine will be upgraded to a ryzen 9 3xxx sometime next year (more & faster cores and threads will be nice, but i really want more RAM for ZFS ARC - DDR3 is both obsolete and expensive for 16 or 32GB sticks. DDR4 isn't). I'll be looking for a motherboard with at least one Intel NIC (not realtek), preferably two. If it only has one, I'll just get a PCI-e intel NIC for the NBN port - I found some on ebay last week for under $30 each from somewhere in china. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>