Router to handle multiple public IP addresses

networking routing hardware router
James Curran picture James Curran · Sep 23, 2008 · Viewed 16.6k times · Source

I am presently running several websites and a mail server from my home network. I have a business DSL account with 8 public IP addresses (1 by itself, and 7 in a block). To handle routing/firewall/gateway, I am presently using RRAS, DNS, & DHCP from Windows 2003 running on a ancient (circa 2001) PC -- which I suspect is going to fail any time now.

What I would like to do is replace that with a simple router. Have a consumer model LinkSys Wifi-router, which I'm presently just using as an access point (don't have the model number handy, but it's one of their standard models). It seems to be able to handle all the NAT/firewall/DHCP tasks -- except for handling routing the multiple public addresses. (e.g., I need x.x.x.123, port 21 getting to one machine, but port 80 of x.x.x.123 & x.x.x.124 to going to another, and x.x.x.123, port 5000 to still another etc).

So my questions are:

  • Can this be done with standard Linksys router, which they just don't explain in the consumer manual?
  • Can this be done ... if I replace the firmware with a community/OS version (and if so, which one?)
  • If neither of the above, can someone recommend a profession router (preferably with wifi) that does do this, which is close to a consumer level price point.
  • Alternately, is there a reliable OS/3rd party replacement to RRAS which handles this (since RRAS is the part causing the most trouble)
  • Alternate-Alternately, can someone point to a VERY simple HOWTO to doing this (ie. follow these steps and forget about it), to installing a LINUX system to do this) (since I assume I can run Linux longer on the old machine)?

    • Answer

    bmdhacks picture bmdhacks · Sep 23, 2008

    This can't be done on a Linksys router with stock firmware. It can be done if you load a third-party firmware, but there's no GUI (afaik) to accomplish it, so you'll be hacking system shell scripts which is pretty hairy. I would recommend getting a low-power or older PC and installing PFSense.

    PFSense is an open-source router appliance OS distribution with a very easy to use web front end.

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