I want (a router with) it all!

I've been doing some research on smb routers (office class, but good enough
for putting servers behind), and I've run into the annoying "feature ven
diagram." That is, two or three products that all have most of the features
I want, except for a couple, and those areas of lacking features are not
always the same. So...since I don't have a blog and can't invoke the Lazy
Web <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_web>.

So, here is my list of desired features.

All the standard "broadband router" features. Think your low end Linksys or
Netgear units.

and then the higher-end features:

VPN tunnels (usable with free clients, preferably)

One-to-one NAT
Mapping external, routable IPs to internal addresses. That is, all requests
to 111.222.333.444 are directed to 192.168.1.55. More than just port
forwarding.

Ability to define firewall rules on that one-to-one NAT. The Linksys unit I
found seemed to have this, but the Netgear userguide said there were no
firewall rules for this.

"Static" DHCP
Netgear calls this address reservation, the linksys unit didn't seem to have
it. That is, IP address assignment, via DHCP by the MAC address of the
requester.

Caching DNS
Netgear seems to do DNS Proxy, I think Linksys does DNS caching

LAN DNS lookup
Explanation: when a computer gets a DHCP address, it sends a client ID, which
is the name of the computer. I want to be able to do an NS lookup on this
name and get back the client's IP. I know that a WRT54G I used once did
this, but they don't seem to say in the specs whether or not a model supports
it.

Low price, preferably. Probably looking at Linksys or Netgear. Maybe Cisco,
but I don't know if we have that kind of money at the moment.

Hmm...should I just by a WRT54G and put OpenWRT or dd-wrt on it? :) Any
recommendations when it comes to hardware reliability?

j

-- 
Joshua Kugler                           
Lead System Admin -- Senior Programmer
http://www.eeinternet.com
PGP Key: http://pgp.mit.edu/  ID 0xDB26D7CE
PO Box 80086 -- Fairbanks, AK 99708 -- Ph: 907-456-5581 Fax: 907-456-3111
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