Has anyone tried using a beaglebone as a router? I was considering getting one and using a USB Ethernet to add a second interface.
An aside - are there any arm boards with dual Ethernet? Are there any with gigabit Ethernet? Could they theoretically even keep up with 2 gigabit ports?
I have a bunch of these Linux ARM boards including the original beaglebone, rpi, pcduino, ODROID-X2 and a few others. Most of these have less than stellar IO and almost all are 10/100 only. The i.MX6-based Sabre Lite has gigE, although perf maxes out much lower. Here's lots of details: http://boundarydevices.com/i-mx6-ethernet/ - it can't get close to maxing out a single, much less two ports.
If you are looking for something exclusively to do routing, you really should take a look at dedicated hardware from guys like Mikrotik http://routerboard.com/ or Ubiquiti http://dl.ubnt.com/Tolly212128UbiquitiEdgeRouterLitePricePer... - they're actually cheaper than the Sabre Lite and perform much, much better. They're also pretty open/hackable to boot.
Thanks for these links. I ended up grabbing a routerboard 450G because they look like a really nice piece of kit. Probably overkill for playing around with routing, but I couldn't help myself.
Cool, the Mikrotiks are perfect for getting into routing as the RouterOS docs are very in-depth w/ lots of examples (yay, wikis): http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:TOC
its not arm its x86 I think, but you can put bsd and m0n0wall or pfSense on them. Also I believe these boards are designed for what you want to do and would do abetter job then a beaglebone.
Why mess around with modifying something that's not a router? You can get a very nice 5 port gigabit, wireless-N TP-Link router for $45. OpenWRT has very good support for them.
An aside - are there any arm boards with dual Ethernet? Are there any with gigabit Ethernet? Could they theoretically even keep up with 2 gigabit ports?