New Router: Final Thoughts

These probably aren't my final thoughts on my new OpenBSD 3.8 router, but from this point out I imagine that the frequency and depth of the thoughts will decrease substantially.

I have become a supernerd: I have transcended you regular nerds who say that broadband is all shiny and dial-up is like living in the stone age.

This will blow your mind: broadband is stone age. Yeah, you heard me.

Broadband is stone age, and I pity those of you who rely on it. The shiny thing is broadband with ACK packet prioritization. It's the wave of the future, and I don't think I want to use a router that doesn't use prioritization ever again.

I will, of course. I just won't want to.

The neat thing about packet prioritization is that you can pick what matters most to you, and then that data will be preferentially treated over your less-valued data. Your overall bandwidth and throughput remain largely unchanged — we're not casting spells on the pipe itself — we're just selectively scheduling the things we want done fastest first.

For most people, that's going to be HTTP and DNS. For nerds or better, SSH, too. (SSH works much like telnet. Telnet is a horrendously inefficient communication protocol (20 bytes of overhead for every 1 byte you send), and that's without encryption.) So whenever your router sees packets doing one of your Very Important Jobs, it does everything it can to handle it quickly so you, the user, aren't left waiting and wondering what's taking so long.