I have one of these for my office, an Asus WL-500G Premium v2.  I originally wanted a v1, but all they had left was a v2.  I have a Asus wl-500g Deluxe at home, that was my old firewall/wifi router until I got the pix 506E.

Now this asus is horrible as far as software.  It's got alpha software at best, and not so stable. So I didn't even bother powering it up with the original software.

I first installed DD-WRT, but I didn't find it so stable.  I REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted to install Tomato on it.

So I tried and I tried.. and nothing..  So I looked up the chipset, and it was the same as the Buffalo WHR-G125, which was supported by Tomato ND.  So I tried it and I got it to work!

So let's first review the hardware.. then we'll get to the software.

The hardware is "not bad".  I like the asus better than the linksys because it's nigh impossible to brick the asus.  Hold down the reset button, unplug for 10 seconds, plug it in again while holding the reset button, and it will flash.. you can then use the asus utility (or tftp if you are on linux or don't have the asus utility) and reflash the router.  Done!  I've tried everything and it's never bricked..  And flashing it doesn't require you to do strange things like rub your belly while you pat your head.

The Buffalo WHR-G125 and theWL-500G Premium V2 both use the Broadcom 5354 integrated chipset running at 240Mhz .  It's the heavily integrated chipset, integrating just about everything you need in a router onto 1 chip. I don't know about the price (I think the Buffalo is cheaper) but the Premium v2 has 8 megs of flash ram, vs the 4megs on the buffalo.  So when more goodies come out, it's much more hackable.  

Here's info about the chip (from its website:)

BCM5354
802.11b/g Router System-on-Chip with BroadRange™ Technology

The BCM5354 integrates a high-performance MIPS32 processor, IEEE 802.11 b/g MAC/PHY, 2.4-GHz direct conversion radio, USB 2.0 host controller, SDRAM controller, and a configurable five-port Fast Ethernet (FE) switch. The BCM5354 provides wireless LAN connectivity supporting data rates of up to 125 Mbps that is backward-compatible with standard 802.11 b/g.

The BCM5354 supports a WAN connection via its configurable media interfaces. The per-port programmable four-level priority queues enable QoS (IEEE 802.1p) for guaranteed bandwidth applications, DiffServ/TOS, and L2/L3 IGMP snooping. The IEEE 802.1Q VLAN allows flexible implementation of VLAN grouping and WAN port segregation.

	Features

• 240-MHz MIPS32® CPU core with 16-KB instruction cache, 16-KB data cache, and 1-KB pre-fetch cache


• 2.4-GHz direct conversion radio


• The BCM5354 achieves the lowest cost and highest performance router system-on-chip (SoC) integration for residential and small office, home office (SOHO) markets


• Time-to-market is significantly reduced through stable Linux® and VxWorks® kernels, board support packages (BSPs), drivers and toolchains

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm not a huge fan of the MIPS chips... but I like them better than the ARM.  Of the 3 smaller chipsets, I prefer PowerPC, MIPS, and then ARM, in that order.  I find that for the same speed, the PPC's kick everybody else's ass, the MIPS is somewhere in the middle, and the ARM is significantly slower.

I have been running my Buffalo HDHG NAS behind it, as both an ftp server as well as running mldonkey on it, as a downloader.  I push up a few hundred gigs a month, and a few hundred gigs downloaded, and router does just fine.  I turned on QOS on tomato, and it is not too bad.  While I haven't found that I can "overload" the router, I do find that when there's a significant load, you can feel it.  That's not true with my pix at home, of course I can't compare them both, one is near enterprise level (especially now that I hacked the 506E ) and the other is just a SOHO router.  But with tomato, it's a significant booster as far as speed and stability.

What I do love about Tomato are the real time graphs, and the QOS control.  It's small, light, easy to manage, and just works out of the box.  I love that.  If I hack my pix some more and it dies, I'll buy another one of these and put Tomato on it.  There's no USB support on tomato, but that's ok, I think of it as a router that happens to do wifi also.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with this router, and highly recommend it over all the other ones for a Soho router.  It's got decent speed, and with Tomato on it, I'm sure it will spank most routers 10x the price.  Running some ADSL speeds, it will saturate my entire office line of 10Megs down / 2 Megs up.  So unless you've got 100Mbits coming to your house, this should do fine.  Like all Broadcom chipsets, max connections is pegged at 4096, but this generally should not be a problem for all but the hardest of hard core home users.  Too bad tomato doesn't support VPN, but I honestly don't think you want to use any SOHO router as a VPN'ed router to the central office.  It is what it is, a great home router or a small office router that doesn't require VPN.  The speed isn't bad if you don't have too many connections, good for <8 computers or so.  It's perfect for the office since I have 3 computers and that's it.  It's not a pix, and doesn't perform like one, but it's not priced like a pix either.  Best Asus WL-500G Premium v2 + Tomato the best bang for your buck as far as SOHO routers PERIOD.

I have always wanted to have a pix.. and so I decided one day, yes.. I will run a pix firewall for my home firewall.  Overkill?  Sure..  But what's worth doing is worth overdoing, so the Mythbusters have taught me.

There are 2 PC100 RAM slots inside, so the first thing I did was buy another 32Megs.  Turns out, I didn't really need to because the ram usage never really topped 17Meg, which is what it starts out at, and never climbs.  The load on the CPU, which was a Celeron 300Mhz with a 66Mhz bus, was at a load of somewhere between 2~7%, depending on how many connections were open.  I manage to get it up to 49% usage, when I was doing 3DES VPN.  I picked 3DES to test because AES is much more efficient, and I wanted to load up the CPU.  The CPU runs really really hot..

Upon reading the Cisco Pix Wiki , I discovered that the motherboard of the 506E is the same as the Pix 525, which has a 600Mhz Coppermine Pentium III CPU.  So I put that on my todo list.  I surfed and googled around, and found a guy who hacks Ciscos.  I asked him about it, and he said it was a fairly strange idea but probably quite doable.  So researching, I figure I would try to mimick the specs of the original 506E but times 2.

Cisco Pix 506E's CPU  (Original):

300Mhz Celeron with 66Mhz Bus on Socket 370

(Ugly looking CPU with no markings on it..  It's made of ceramic, very heavy, and really hot.

Planned Modification:

600Mhz PentiumIII with 133Mhz Bus on Socket 370

The reason I picked these specifications were for a number of reasons:

1. I was scared that with the horrible heat distribution of the 506E, a super fast CPU might burn the mobo.


2. I didn't want to pick something with a 100Mhz bus because I wanted the multipliers to be multiples of the original. So in this case, 300Mhz => 600Mhz.  66Mhz bus => 133Mhz bus. I figure compatibility would be better this way and I'd have a better shot at making this work.


3. Because the 525 uses a 600Mhz and I assume the same motherboard, or at least it uses the same Intel 440BX Seattle chipset onboard.


4. The voltage requirement was lower than the Celeron, not higher.
   

So I found one on the Taiwanese ebay for $4USD.  So I bid and bought it.  Today was the big day.  I pulled out the Celeron and slapped in the PIII.  The "theory" was that I just slap some heat transfer compound, close it up, turn it on, and away it goes!!

And... (drum roll).. it just booted up.  Absolutely no drama whatsoever.  Now, the CPU runs at 0% all the time...  I am not sure if it's running at 66Mhz or 133Mhz, and don't know how I'd be able to check, but in theory, this chip is 4x faster (300Mhz vs 600Mhz) and (66Mhz vs 133Mhz) I doubled the clock bus speed as well as the CPU speed.

The other part of the good news is that the Celeron ran at 2.0V, while the PIII runs at 1.65V.  So the lower voltage should be a heatsource and power savings (hopefully).  The heatsink on the Celeron is MASSIVE.  The one on the PIII is really dinky, so I hope that heat transfer isn't a problem.

I don't really do any VPN or anything that drastic with my firewall.. If I did, I'd upgrade it to 256Megs of ram or something.  Anyway, my 506E is effectively running like a 525.

506E (New) MSRP $1549 USD

525 (New) MSRP $4000 USD

32Meg additional PC100 ram cost me $10.

PIII 600Mhz with 133Mhz bus, cost me $4.

So if you buy a 506E and dump another $20 into it, you will have a 525 equivalent.  Yes yes yes, I know, 525 will run the ASA.  You can hack the 506E to run ASA as well.  But I don't need UTM and so no need for me to.  I might do it though just so I can truly have a hacked 506E.  But for now, I'm super happy with the CPU upgrade.

You can pick up a 506E for cheap on evilbay, and PC100 ram is cheap, and so are PIII's.  If you are brave (or stupid) and would like to try an even faster CPU, knock yourself out.  But so far, no problems with the PIII.  I am still concerned about overheating so time will tell.

From Tom's Hardware :

Note that the L2 cache is much bigger on the PIII, 2x as big.  Also, the bus speed as well as the inherent CPU speed.

So there you go!  Hack your 506E into a near 525.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Update ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am curious, the "show version" shows PIII 448Mhz..  ???!?!  Oh well..

Copy & Past Below:

Cisco PIX Firewall Version 6.3(5)
Cisco PIX Device Manager Version 3.0(4)

Compiled on Thu 04-Aug-05 21:40 by morlee

pixfirewall up 32 mins 3 secs

Hardware:   PIX-506E, 64 MB RAM, CPU Pentium III 448 MHz  (Why 448Mhz??  I'm not sure.. Mobo restriction??)
Flash E28F640J3 @ 0x300, 8MB
BIOS Flash AM29F400B @ 0xfffd8000, 32KB

Since I don't have the budget of cisco, I really couldn't test the router in the way I would like to.. so I had to start thinking up creative ways.  So..

I created a 3DES VPN from my desktop (Windows XP) to the router.  I then looked for an open iperf computer online, (Thank you University of Florida! ) and begin to iperf the crap out of it.

I then did a

iperf -c [server] -u -b1000m -w2m -i1s

to see if I can get the CPU load up.  Well.. I ran 10 of these concurrently, for a full cached saturation of close to 80megs of data.  (I'm sure my ISP is gonna ban me now..) I got the CPU up to 75%.  So that means on this setup, I can reasonally expect about a 100meg ceiling for VPN.  (I picked 3DES instead of AES because the load is heavier on 3DES and the goal was to load up the cpu).  Without VPN, the load topped around 11%.  For regular usage though, the system shows 0% utilization.  So there you go, I haven't quite figured out how to spawn a ridiculous amount of connections to test, but I have over 200+ BT files going, and the connection load floats at around 1000+ at any given time, so it's not too bad.  All in all, excellent upgrade.  Will I notice a difference in my browsing?  Probably not.  Will I smile with pride and joy at hacking yet another piece of hardware?  Absolutely.

My actual pics:

Here's the Pix 506E opened up.  Notice the 2 rows of 32Megs of ram.  I will probably upgrade this later.

 Here's a pic with the CPU fan off, showing the Celeron.

Here's a Celeron vs PIII shot.

 And Finally, here's the PIII installed.

One more comment; I changed out the CPU thermal compound and the box got HOT.. which is a good thing, which means it's wicking the heat from the CPU much better.  I was originally concerned about the heat since the heat sink contact point on the PIII is so small compared to the Celeron..  The compound on the Celeron had hardened already, and so changing it out is a great idea regardless if you are going to upgrade the CPU or not.

Ahoy!  Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.  I love these guys.  I love Cap'n Slappy the best.  So if it's still Sept 19th where you live, it's not too late to talk like a pirate!  It's the only day you can call a chick a wench and mean it!  

Arrrg you land lovers!!  

The holy grail everybody has been searching for..

 RVMB to PS3 playable files using only Open Source Software. 

 Short and sweet, here it is:  

my encode_to_ps3.bat 

@echo off

mencoder.exe -ofps 30000/1001 -af lavcresample=24000 -vf harddup -of lavf -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts vbitrate=1200:aglobal=1:vglobal=1:vcodec=mpeg4:acodec=libfaac:threads=2 -lavfopts format=psp %1 -o %1.mp4

If you are using unix, you can change the "%1" to $1.

That's it!  This will produce a playable mp4 formatted file for you using mencoder.

You can change the vbit rate if you want to.  Also, the "threads=2" is useful to cut the encoding time in half (well, about 33%) if you have dual core.  If you have a quad core, change it to "threads=4".

That's it!  Convert all your rmvb's to play on the ps3.  I love the PS3.  I'm sony's biggest nightmare..