Grumpy, the utility box.

If you have read the hardware specifications, you will have seen that Grumpy would be considered lacking, for most purposes. Having spent much time between operating systems, it became clear very early on that linux has a more natural affinity for networking. Especially in terms of speed and overall performance. The other thing I learned is that typical SOHO routers (Linksys, D-Link, etc.) are generally not optimized to perform Network Address Translation (NAT) on connections over 30mbit. NAT is the technology that allows multiple computers to connect to the internet behind a single IP address. It is somewhat CPU intensive, but is much more noticeable to the power users out there. The biggest improvement over the SOHO routers is the sheer quantity of ram in Grumpy, allotting the machine as much memory required for the thousands of connections per second the machine makes to the internet during our busiest hours.

Grumpy, while old, is obviously much more powerful than any of these common routers. By giving the machine two dedicated network cards, I was able to offload the task of NATing to Grumpy, leaving my home routers only to perform the switching. This machine has been indispensable, ever since. A basic look at my home network topology is below.

The box also serves DNS to the lan whilst blocking ads by running a /etc/hosts file provided by these guys. I wanted to implement Deep Packet Inspection, but the hardware requirements to do that on a relatively saturated highspeed link are well above and beyond the performance capabilities of Grumpy. That aside, Grumpy isn't just old, it's my savior.