Second Ethernet port needed!

[anest]

Quote from ryao on September 15, 2011, 14:04

ryao, your link is pointless!!!
>> its will be fast and powerful enough as Raspi??! Are you sure?
Or you reading only selectively?.. 8O

[jamesh]

Quote from anest on September 15, 2011, 19:26
Quote from ryao on September 15, 2011, 14:04

ryao, your link is pointless!!!
>> its will be fast and powerful enough as Raspi??! Are you sure?
Or you reading only selectively?.. 8O

Be polite please. He answered your question - you asked where you could find a router for the price of a Raspi - he provided a link that shows a lot of routers at around the same price.

Whether they are as fast or powerful as a Raspi is not really relevant - they are routers, which is what you appeared to want to use the Raspi for.

Routers I believe tend to use MIPS processor, and often quite fast memory. Whether they would be as fast as a Raspi you cannot tell without taking them apart and finding out what powers them.

Whether a Raspi would be as fast as a dedicated router, well, I don't know. It's not been tried.

[mister walter]

What kind of data rates are we looking at over the GPIO interface? It would be cool to have a gigabit Ethernet "expansion card", however I don't know what our chip's GPIO performance is like.

[Archangel5089]

I may be remembering incorrectly but in Ebens' Q&A didn't he mention putting wireless into the RPi? I think the intention was to remove the ethernet port to offset the cost but keeping both would make this product a lot more versatile. I use the wired/wireless connections on a netbook to bridge connections all the time, my friend runs his XBox through the same model... and invariably forgets to turn hibernate off. We have a lot of 20 minute co-op sessions :S

[willjcroz]

Just a thought on the whole two ethernet port issue:

USB will be great for expansion but you could set up a fully featured router using the single ethernet port anyway. You could have the RasPi plugged in (via ethernet) to your main router/4-port switch as if it were just another network device, then disable the DHCP on main router. If you set the RasPi to provide DHCP and forwarding of IP packets and set the RP default route to point to the ISP modem/router then it could receive all Internet bound traffic inbound on its ethernet and then forward them back out of the ethernet towards your main modem/router. This would introduce an extra IP hop and tiny bit of extra latency but likely no more than a few hundred microseconds. In theory you would have a max. of 100mbit bandwidth still for your Internet (full duplex 100mbit network), if this is not enough then you officially have a 'nice problem to have'.

For even more power/fun, if your router supports PPPoE or RFC 1483 bridging then you could eliminate the actual IP hop and have the RasPi get the 'real' Internet address from your ISP; your main router/modem would be demoted to just being a dumb ethernet/ATM bridge (which, if your modem is anything like mine, is all it deserves to be...). You would need to set up NAT/IP-masquerading on the RasPi for IPv4 for this, but this is easy these days.

Personally I am hoping that we see OpenWRT (https://openwrt.org/) support the Raspberry Pi, not only would we get a solid and extremely flexible router platform, we would also have access to a fairly easy to explore automated build tree allowing for end users to try their hand at building their own custom OS images, applying patches etc

[anest]

One phisical port is not answer for my needs. But thanks for answer anyway - its can be helpfull for someone also.

[jamesh]

Quote from anest on September 27, 2011, 11:23
One phisical port is not answer for my needs. But thanks for answer anyway - its can be helpfull for someone also.

Well, it's all you are getting on the RaspberryPi I'm afraid, so if that doesn't suit your needs I guess the device doesn't. There's no chance of two ports on the first device at all, and probably not on subsequent ones either - just not enough demand to offset the additional cost for all users.

[Lob0426]

Many of the routers have a USB port, but they are not fully implemented. The router I am using in my project has a Broadcom chipset that I recently discovered has USB. BCM5354, this SoC I can not even find a data sheet on it to find the USB pins. USB through an aftermarket firmware might open up some of these routers for communication without a second USB port. You would still be limited by the fact that USB 2.0 is half duplex. Remember that the RasPi Ethernet is part of the USB hub chipset LAN9512 and therefor has the same limitations.