I just got a new Droid X. First off, I love the phone. Its got great hardware and features, and is a pleasure to use. And no, I do not think its to big.

Only issue so far with the phone itself, is WiFi connectivity. Unlike some others who have dropped connections and slow speeds on WiFi, I actually had router freezes when the Droid was connected.

I am using WPA2 with AES. Once I changed to TKIP, my issues went away. Hopefully this will be fixed soon with a software update. Would be a shame to let something very minor effect such an amazing phone.

I was downloading a version of Ubuntu the other day through BitTorrent, and noticed that my entire network was becoming unresponsive almost the moment the download started (something that does not occur when over HTTP or FTP). The latency of everything else network related was through the roof. Web page loads, local traffic, FTP requests, etc.

A quick check at the router, and the router load was really high. Over 15, maxing at 17 for the short time I glanced at it. At first, I figured a quick restart would solve the issue. I have previously had some issues with this router box that seemed to be caused by some sort of a system hang or loop. I should mention that this is not a shabby box for Smoothwall. I have 512 RAM, and a 2.2 GHz CPU (perhaps overkill, but this is what I had laying around when my old smooth box blew up).

Once the machine was fully booted, the network went right back to lagging. Again, load was way to high. Paused the torrent, and the load went back to normal.

It seems that the number of concurrent requests that the torrent is asking for overwhelms the router, even with some decent specs for the machine. Limiting the priority of P2P through QOS seemed to help a lot.

Its no wonder that many organizations ban P2P applications. And this really has me thinking of what kind of traffic shaping or other methods large organizations like Universities use to mitigate the latency and lag caused by this type of traffic.

I have gone through quite a few SoHo type routers (small office/home office) over the years. Almost all of these were systems such as Netgear, Linksys, etc. That is till I discovered the Linux based firewall/router. If I remember correctly, the first I tried was IPCop. The distro I currently use, is Smoothwall.

I switched the work router over to new hardware today, and figured I would talk about it. The new hardware, while overkill for a router, was added due to the old system failing. It was old when I began using it for Smoothwall, and finally gave out. Now I am running on a 2GHz Celeron, with 640MB RAM, 4 NICs, and a 60GB Hard Drive. The old system was a Duron based, with 3 NICs, 256MB RAM, and a 10GB HD.

I have long wanted to add to my network, as I wanted to run a purple zone (more explanation soon) for WiFi. Yet the old system did not have room for another PCI NIC. Since the new system had 3 PCI slots, it worked perfectly. Below is a very simple diagram of what I am running now.

The four NICs are as follows:

1. Red – Connects to Static DSL line
2. Green – LAN network. Safe zone with about 20 stations, 2 switches.
3. Orange – DMZ Zone. LAMP server and Mail server sit here. No DHCP, incoming “pinholes” only allow for HTTP and SMTP/POP access.
4. Purple – WiFi subnet. DHCP is active. No ethernet NICs.

The purple zone is separated physically from the green zone. This enables me to protect the sensitive computers on the green interface from crackers, unauthorized entry via WiFi, and users who may not be very careful. The orange zone is also physically separate from the other zones. If my LAMP server gets compromised, nothing else is harmed.

This system has many advantages over the simple units purchased from stores. For one, the subnets are really separate. And in the case of the purple network, this option is simply not available. I have never tried to use the “DMZ Port” that some routers have, yet I have heard they are not true DMZ zones.

In addition to the benefits of the subnets, Smoothwall has extra features that would normally cost you quite a bit to get in a store bought solution. Such as:

• IDS (via Snort)
• Web Proxy that can be set to transparent, so that you can log all outgoing HTTP traffic without notice/distraction to users. This can also be setup to use a central proxy. Cache size is adjustable.
• IM Proxy, logs all IM traffic (AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo) and can filter swear words.
• POP Proxy that scans and filters virus (via Clam AV)

In addition to the more standard router functions. There is also some I did not mention. Over all, Smoothwall gives me the ability to control very precisely how my traffic is handled, and I can even get more detailed with addons like Dans Guardian.