Basically what I'm hoping to do is buy a WRT54GL or WL-500Gp and convert it into a Dual Wan Router that primarly does some port forwarding and NAT for an network of over 10-15 computers and device...

It will be connected to a cable modem providing two IP address via DHCP, and it has an total download of 10mbit and 1mbit upload, plus I may expand the network with a second separate modem to get up to 20mbit down and 2mbit up...

Anyway I've researched on the WRT54GL, and it can support routing of 50mbit from WAN to LAN, so obviously with dual WAN that would lose me a bit of that throughput, so say "total" of 11mbit (down/up) for each WAN plus the LAN traffic which would be 22mbit total for the two WAN port plus 22mbit routed from the WAN port to LAN which is 44mbit routed through the switch...

Anyway what I'm hoping to do with the router itself is:
- Two dhclient, one for each WAN
- iptable perhaps with connection tracking
- "DMZ" from one of the WAN port to an 192.168.0.1/24 subnet, so ALL of the traffic inbound and outbound on that subnet and WAN port is transparently forwarded to each others
- SNAT with several DNAT port forwarding for the second WAN port, to an 10.10.10.0/24 subnet, it basically will SNAT all traffic outbound, and DNAT I would estimate about 10-15 ports inbound to various clients on that subnet
- Wireless would be turned off
- Firewall will by default deny all inbound connection unless it was DNAT on one of the WAN, or being DMZed on the other WAN, plus it would only allow ssh to connect on the inside LAN port from 10.10.10.0/24 subnet
- NTP maybe for time keeping
- Maybe also forward its logs to an machine on the 10.10.10.0/24 subnet
- iproute2 for policy based routing for the Dual WAN

Now onto the hardware questions...

My main concern is the 16MB of RAM on the WRT54GL, will it be able to handle the load of approximately up to estimated 600-700kbps UDP VoIP traffic on the 192.168.0.0/24 DMZ network. Plus handle about 10 to 20mbit of traffic from the 10.10.10.0/24 subnet?

I know the bandwidth probably isn't as big of a problem as number of connections... well atleast 1-2 computer may be bittorrenting stuff so that would increase the load... but then again the router will only be performing basic firewall and NAT functionality and that's it...

So the concern about the 16MB of RAM lead me to research the WL-500Gp model, and it looks nice, it supports VLAN, which I consider an required feature because of the Dual WAN requirement... But I'm just concerned about bricking it plus its about 25-30$ higher than the WRT54GL...

So which router should I go for the WRT54GL or the Asus WL-500Gp?  I hope I've outlined my requirement well enough above.

(Last edited by antimatter on 4 Aug 2007, 06:24)

Asus has more ram (32MB), more flash (8MB) and faster cpu (266 vs 200MHz). I'd say a cpu boost would be quite noticable.
They both support the same features (if you use openwrt) so it's really just hardware difference. I use a few Asus routers and never had a problem, why would you worry bricking it?

It will be my first time ever with openWRT, so I'm quite new, but I feel confident about using it, because I've been using linux/bsd in a few variant over the years, but I was just leery about bricking it, because the wiki docs said that it doesn't have jtag and if it gets bricked its tougher to recover i think.

You have quite a few options when you mess something up. First is the openwrt failsafe mode (works on any router). If router can boot, then you can recover from any error with failsafe mode. Then, there is the asus failsafe mode where you can reflash the firmware with the restore utility if it doesn't boot. This one has one weakness yes - it won't set a default ip address, but whatever is set in nvram. If the nvram values are messed up (like setting lan_ipaddr=0.0.0.0) then it won't work.