Routers and eBay

One thing I discovered during the course of the LAN party is that my little Linksys 802.11g router was not good enough to cut it for networks of the size I had. In this case, 36 people connected to a DSL line. The problem arises in that the venue's DSL service is very fragile, and will cut out and die if over taxed. As they normally have 7 computers online at any one time, this isn't a problem and works well for them.

With so many users, however, the traffic can get overwhelming. With people playing WOW online, at least 25 with open chat sessions, playing other games like CounterStrike online, getting updates for their games (despite the fact that I have most of them on a local server), and even doing things like using BitTorrent or Usenet to saturate the connection will render important things, like account validation for EA's games, unresponsive, or even crash the connection.

To solve this problem a bit, the WRT54G that I use does provide some basic port blocking, but is very inflexible and a pain to set up when you have lots of rules. Battlefield 2, for example, requires about 6 ports to be open to authenticate. The router allows you to set up a number of rules, assigning a pair of blocked port ranges to each. You can imagine how hard this can be when trying to allow a few specific ports.

To get around this, and to put some of my recent education of Cisco routers into practice, I started searching eBay for an inexpensive 2600 series router. I needed one with two ethernet ports, so ideally a 2611, 2611XM, or 2621 would fit the bill. There were a number of 2611s on eBay, most of them going for around $100 + shipping. A bit much, but within the budget. But then something happened. I managed to find one of those rare auctions that end up going for far less then its peers. My winning bid was $51! Heck of a deal. I am looking forward to writing some nice, clean, easy ACLs to allow only the traffic I want and keep things running smoothly at further LANs.