[zebrax0r]

Hi all. Hope you're all well.

I don't post a lot, but I lurk and read a bit...

I've currently got an Linksys EA6900 (stock) that, after doing a lot of reading across this forum and others is feeling a fair bit like a lame-duck in some respects. Plenty of hardware power in the SoC, but some unusual shortcomings. Found the 32k-limit issues perplexing too.

Anyway...

I currently have a DOCSIS 3.0 connection on the front end/WAN and on this unit, in bridge mode, to the stock EA6900 via a lump of Cat6a I can pull down ~119Mbit/sec without any real issues. To this end, the front end WAN port on the EA6900 seems to keep up nicely with my DOCSIS3 connection.

Unfortunately, given the seemingly limited (and sort of patchy/unstable) support dd-wrt seems to have for the unit (let alone others, such as Tomato), I am hesitant to hang onto this unit much longer. Perhaps I'm not being particularly patient, but...eh.

I am considering grabbing a Netgear R8000 unit. It would seem to be that the community is more comfortable and positive about the future of this unit, compared to where the EA6900 is sitting. Please, correct me if that seems/feels inaccurate or I'm not reading this situation particularly well.

What I want to ask and do is a bit of a sanity check before I go and grab an R8000, that said.

I have had a few Linksys/Cisco units in the past running dd-wrt and they've all be good to me, as has dd-wrt, with the exception of a couple of small things.

1. fast-nat has bitten me a few times. I didn't realise it until I upgraded my cable connection to a 100Mbit/sec+ service. I started to find that I couldn't push 100Mbit/sec through my E3000 at the time and it was topping out at a rather sad 48 to 56Mbit/sec (whilst dd-wrt'ed...if I put it back to stock, I saw 119Mbit/sec). Really frustrated me. Started reading on here and got schooled fairly quickly about fast-nat and the implications. Has any of this stuff changed? I remember there being some interesting discussions about the discrepancies between fast-nat connection tracking and net-filter mechanisms and I'm not sure I ever got to the bottom of whether or not my poor WAN port performance to the dd-wrt'ed router was as a consequence of lack of CPU power and no fast-nat implementation or it was a causality of no fast-nat being ABLE to be implemented. Ergo: I'd be pretty sad if I dd-wrt an R8000 and I can't actually see my 119Mbits/sec WAN port throughput on it :-\. Or am I asking for too much?

2. VPN. In my country, mandatory-meta-data-retention laws are about to be implemented, so I'd like to keep myself quiet online by signing up to a service such as PIA. What I've discovered with the EA6900 at least, is that it has absolutely no inbuilt OpenVPN functionality at the router side - I know the R8000 does, but, if I dd-wrt the unit, how much can anyone tell me about using OpenVPN + dd-wrt + the R8000 as a solution? What are the overheads in terms of bandwidth and latency like? What consideration factors should I factor in?

3. In general - I'd like to know how things are progressing with the R8000 with dd-wrt. Just read the R8000 thread that's about 13 pages long now and I've seen some posts from Kong about it.

Hopefully I've not asked anything stupid/ill informed.


Thank you all, as always.

z