WAP/Router for use with OpenVPN

[Jarod Wilson]

On Jul 7, 2009, at 3:49 PM, Ben Scott wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 1:49 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen<rozzin at geekspace.com 
> > wrote:
>> You might be surprised how little it takes, actually ...
>
>  I might at that.
>
>  It also depends on the speed of the network.  If you're connecting
> via a relatively slow Internet link, you don't need much CPU power to
> keep up.
>
>> ... 100-MHz system Pentium ...
>> ... It looks like these Linksys routers are at least as fast: ...
>
>  That's not really apples-to-apples; all the LinkSys routers are MIPS
> architecture, and tuned for low-power and low-cost.  Clock rate alone
> doesn't tell the whole story.
>
>  All the above said, if you could get acceptable performance out of a
> 100 MHz Pentium, that's promising.  :)
>
>> And they have to have enough computing-power to run WPA, right?
>
>  Wireless crypto may be implemented in dedicated hardware in the
> wireless chipset, not on the general-purpose processor (where Linux
> and OpenVPN run), so that may not mean anything.

I've not actually paid attention to most of this thread, but thought  
I'd throw something in wrt the performance of the wrt... I have a  
wrt54gs... I tried using it (under openwrt) with our ipsec (cisco- 
based) vpn at work. I got it working under both vpnc and openswan, but  
the performance was TERRIBLE. Like, 400kbps max throughput with vpnc,  
1.2Mbps throughput with openswan. That's all 3des encryption though,  
not sure what openvpn uses, and/or if aes might be hardware  
accelerated, etc., etc. But when you have a 20Mbps link, and can  
saturate it when using a vpn client on your laptop, its definitely sub- 
par...

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com