9 ms·

It's time to build your own router

185 points by ghosh 11y ago

powvans 11y ago
Everything that's old is new again. Raise your hand if this is how you first got into Linux. I needed to share a spectacularly slow DSL line with my college roommates. Soultion? Cobble together a router out of a cheap Pentium box, a PCI DSL modem, a 10mbit ISA nic, and Debian. Oh, and a couple of days of tinkering. Ah ipchains. Those were the days.
- kchoudhu 11y ago
  I started with a Linux, but eventually moved on to FreeBSD. I learned more about network technologies mucking around with an edge router then I ever did in my CS networking class. It's been an interesting decade.
- mwpmaybe 11y ago
  Yup, had a 486 running Slackware and a Pentium running Windows (FWG? 95?) and wanted to be able to share a single, always-on dial-up connection between them. I asked for a hub (with a 10Base2 BNC hookup and four 10BaseT ports) for my 15th or 16th birthday and found a 10Base2 ISA card for the 486 and a 10BaseT PCI card for the Pentium and went to town with ipchains, ppp, the whole nine yards. Good times. In retrospect, I was very fortunate to have access to not only one but two computers, dial-up Internet, and a second phone line. It didn't seem like it at the time because my friends were getting ISDN lines. So many hours spent on IRC learning about Linux...
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  > Raise your hand if this is how you first got into Linux. _raises hand_ In my case, I had my existing desktop PC and acquired another (used) one. Broadband hadn't yet made it to the rural area I lived and I got tired of moving the phone line back and forth between the two PCs. I was able to find a pair of (very well supported) 3c509s and a crossover cable and managed to build my first network and get both machines online at the same time. 20+ years later, I'm still doing pretty much the same thing, progressing from ipfwadm to ipchains to iptables (on Linux) to pf (on OpenBSD). And, of course, the little dedicated machine flinging my packets nowadays is much faster than I could have ever imagined back then.
  - mwpmaybe 11y ago
    Oh man, ipfwadm, I completely forgot about that. I also now remember an ipmasq command, which google reminds me was kind of a wrapper around ipfwadm or ipchains, and I remember rebuilding my kernel over and over again (overnight!) to get the right combination of networking options. I also remember being very frustrated when I had to drop ipfwadm and learn ipchains for kernel 2.2, and drop ipchains and learn iptables for kernel 2.4!
    - jlgaddis 11y ago
      Yep, so much relief when 2.6 came out and retained iptables!
      - sneak 11y ago
        I also recall doing the same sort of dance with linux kernel RAID, (0.90 vs md-style) and also encrypted block devices (cryptoloop to device mapper). It's nice to remember and realize how stable and performant things are these days.
- dwightgunning 11y ago
  Yeah, one of the first linux distros I touched was IPcop.
- kalleboo 11y ago
  We were a Mac household, so to share the 56K dialup modem over our home LocalTalk network, I dusted off my Centris 660AV and configured the Mac's IP stack to do the routing using IPNetRouter[0] and wrote a couple of remote command AppleScripts so you could tell the modem to dial, hang up or return status. The Macs of those days had RAM Disk support in the ROM so I copied the whole OS onto a RAM disk and unplugged the SCSI drive when it rebooted to create a nice solid-state router. [0] http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_ipr_overview.html http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_ipr_overview.html
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- wiredfool 11y ago
  I remember setting up nat/firewall/routers for my office using cast off desktop machines, a linux on a floppy distro, and a couple of 3com network cards. They may have even been 486 machines, since I was taking what I could get. The IT people were impressed with the security of being able to flip the write protect on the floppy. And the speed, once it was running completely from memory. Less so on the process to make a change. At the time, they were running out of ip addresses because every desktop was allocated a public ip.
- ascorbic 11y ago
  I decided I should use OpenBSD as I'd heard it was really secure. This was 2000. The old machine it was going on had an unsupported NIC, so my first experience of OpenBSD was trying to install drivers from CD. It then literally took a week to compile everything. Happy days. I was so pleased with myself that I bought pufferfish stickers to put on it.
- ngoede 11y ago
  Haha, yeah I shared a dial up connection for a bit of all things. Then when my family got @Home cable internet it was much better for that.
- TheWoodsy 11y ago
  /me puts hand up. Oh the tinkering. 56k POTS, IPChains, Them dodgy Intel NIC's, ADSL PPPoE, IPTables, Bonding, 802.1q VLANs, DSCP tc classes, Squid, Bind, MRTG, Cacti, IMQ Ingress Shaping kernel patch, Radius, Sendmail. I could go on for hours. You break it? You fix it! Best self-schooling I'd ever had.
- acheron 11y ago
  Same here, though we did it with FreeBSD, not Linux. If you've never tried to "make buildworld" on FreeBSD on a Pentium 75, you can try it next time you have a spare couple days.
- qb45 11y ago
  Debian? ipchains? I assigned IP addresses, installed the Microsoft Internet Connection Sharing Service and called it a day :) /me retracts the hand and runs away from flying rocks
  - mwpmaybe 11y ago
    That's two for flinching!
- tonyarkles 11y ago
  I scratch-built a minimal linux distro that had NE2000 support and ipchains. It fit on a single bootable floppy. Through high school, I sold the discs for $100 each, with the promise that it'd take whatever old junk computer you had kicking around and turn it into a reliable router. Paid for my first computer that way!
Cyphus 11y ago
> As far as the routers are concerned, there's no difference between maintaining connections to thousands of individual IP addresses or just to thousands of ports on the same IP address. Has anyone tested this? It makes intuitive sense, but things are often surprising in the performance/optimization world.
- NetStrikeForce 11y ago
  As far as routers are concerned, that's mostly true. If the router has a big routing table and packets are coming from different sources, it may have to spend some time looking up those routes, but that's one of its core competences anyway :) There are going to be, however, many people out there throttling 10k simultaneous connections from the same host, while they wouldn't bat an eye for 20k simultaneous connections coming from 2k different hosts in total.
xuhu 11y ago
Spoiler: the homebrew solution didn't have WiFi. Unless your LAN is servers-only, how much of an option is no-WiFi these days ?
- kchoudhu 11y ago
  hostapd is a wonderful thing.
- lultimouomo 11y ago
  Not that it would be hard to add and configure; the only problem would be that WiFi PC card offer a much shorter range than APs. OP used Ubiquiti APs, directly managed from the homebrew router. Seems a sensible solution.
  - throwaway7767 11y ago
    > Not that it would be hard to add and configure; the only problem would be that WiFi PC card offer a much shorter range than APs. They generally use the same cards, it's having proper antennas that makes the most difference.
- jevinskie 11y ago
  The author mentions using WiFi APs, basically Ethernet<>WiFi bridges. I've been envisioning a deployment exactly like this myself.
- SG- 11y ago
  I think investing in faster non-wireless router is better with wireless technology changing every few years where you can simply add on wireless only solutions like Ubiquiti's Unifi for only $69.
  - 746F7475 11y ago
    Assuming you have wired connections to begin with. I live in an older apartment complex which was build in early 70s and there is only very poor copper connection, so I can get at most 8Mbs in through that. Slow speeds have forced me to look for alternative solutions and 4G LTE is the way to go here, it costs just shy of twice my old setup, but I get 80-100Mbs in and out, which is 10 times as fast, but being on 4G means I can need my router/modem/thing to be 4G enabled and while my main PC is connected to that router via Ethernet most of my devices use WLAN (things like chromecasts, phones, tables, and laptops). Maybe I'm in very tiny minority here, but just saying things aren't always as simple.
jevinskie 11y ago
This article has motivated me to do this for my parents. They are plagued by wireless reliability problems. I added another WiFi router at the other end of the house and bridged over Ethernet (it was a PITA to configure bridging in the extension router's firmware). I'm not even sure if it helps, though I did ensure that the two APs are operating on the two least-noisy channels. I regularly have connectivity problems when I visit, and feel bad that they have to deal with it on a regular basis. Updating to newer consumer routers has only offered marginal improvements. Their house actually has acquired quite a bit of CAT 5E runs to the far corners, so I'm thinking about getting them a router (small x64 machine as described in the blog post), a gigabit Ethernet switch, and some Ethernet-connected WiFi APs around the house. Does anyone have experience with Ubiquiti APs? They seem to understand that they exist primarily to bridge WiFi and Ethernet, not solve every networking related problem on Earth. I have to say, my WiFi experience at the office improved dramatically after the AirPorts and Cisco APs were tossed for Ubiquiti...
- lstamour 11y ago
  Can't speak to the APs as I was waiting for a month for them to come back in stock (the AC Pro variant) but I really like my little EdgeRouter X. Doesn't fully cover fair QoS to prevent bufferbloat since it can only handle about 200Mbps in software and the hardware doesn't kick in unless QoS is disabled, afaik. But you practically have to pay a thousand bucks or build your own router to get that these days, I just wanted something simple, fast, secure and cheap and the EdgeRouter X fit the bill. Attached a Google OnHub when those went on sale back in December. Edit: By simple I mean advanced but with um, guided templates. Unlike Ubiquiti, the OnHub is actually simple.
- NickNameNick 11y ago
  We used them at work, huge improvement over what we had before. And our office ops guy decided to buy one for home.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  It doesn't make a lot of difference to the deployment, but I don't think the situation in http://libertybsd.net/ubiquiti/ http://libertybsd.net/ubiquiti/ has changed Edit: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unifi-made-me-realize-how-terrible-consumer-wi-fi-gear-is/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unifi... is a pretty great review, though.
microcolonel 11y ago
I have a similar box with OpenBSD which I've been running for about five years now. No hiccups or pain. Added the Ubiquiti APs last year when I started wanting wireless. I could possibly replace the hardware to cover the next five years of power consumption difference though. That's not so much an issue with the new little Celerons though.
voltagex_ 11y ago
11 days ago, I bought a new $200 ADSL2/Wifi router. 10 days ago I was moved on to a fibre connection (yay!). This has removed the need for the very specific Broadcom ADSL chip/DAC that I needed to maintain a stable connection. The particular router I'm using has a 2.6.36 based kernel and some of the worst web UI work I've seen, not to mention a very unstable version of udhcpd. With my new net connection all I need is something that has an Ethernet card and can do a PPPoE handshake - now to find an ARM box with 4+ gigabit NICs...
mwpmaybe 11y ago
Just a quick shout-out for pfSense as an excellent router OS. I've been playing around with ClearOS, DD-WRT, m0n0wall, Smoothwall, Shorewall, etc. (as well as many of my own home-grown solutions) for years and nothing even comes close to the features and performance offered by pfSense. DD-WRT is close but you're extremely limited in terms of the hardware it will run on (think WRT54G/L units with ancient processors and 16MB RAM). Not to dismiss all those other efforts but pfSense is at least worth a try. The writer of this article seems to disregard it off the bat but it's worth the time investment if you're looking for something secure and stable with features like Snort, VPN, traffic shaping, country blocking, DNSBL... the list goes on and on! Plus, it gave me an excuse to finally get my feet wet with FreeBSD. :-)
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  pfSense is a good operating system and provides a nice pointy-clicky interface for configuration. I'll give it that. I was a bit turned off by how they yanked the pfsense-tools repository and then put in some restrictions on access to it. (Jim: There's no need to reply and have the same conversation yet again. I'm well aware of what your reasons for doing so were and you are well within your rights to do it; we don't have to agree with it or like it, though.)
  - bcook 11y ago
    pfSense-tools is no longer used in pfSense 2.3 (which is in beta). https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1842 https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1842
  - pyvpx 11y ago
    pfSense is FreeBSD with a clunky web interface that does some "magic" with PHP using XML. now, that characterization won't be as accurate in the future (I'm genuinely curious to see what happens with python, dpdk, and other things they've mentioned/hinted at) but let's be entirely honest here: it's FreeBSD with a web interface and a support company behind it.
    - mwpmaybe 11y ago
SG- 11y ago
I would have also liked to see how the routers performed with QoS enabled since that really seems to strain them even more.
esaym 11y ago
I run Shorewall on Debian hosted on top of xen on a dual core Atom. This is for my home. I dont think I would run that at an office though.l
Tomte 11y ago
I fondly remember fli4fl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fli4l https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fli4l).
codinghorror 11y ago
Just as a PSA, there are zillions of _very_ nice $300-$350 15w TDP Broadwell x86 boxes, with 4-8GB RAM, 64/128GB SSD, bundled WiFi, and dual gigabit ethernet ports on aliexpress. I don't know why there are so many broadwell boxes on offer, but these are a stellar deal for the price, and are fully solid state, super flexible, extremely fast anything x86 boxes. For example: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fanless-i5-Mini-PC-Windows-Barebone-PC-Broadwell-Intell-Core-i5-5200U-2-7GHz-4K-HTPC/32366202925.html http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fanless-i5-Mini-PC-Windows-Ba... I initally looked on Amazon and found the fitlet-i, which is nice for a 4.5w TDP AMD box.. http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/specifications/fitlet-models-specifications/ http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/specifications/fitlet-mod... .. but these aliexpress deals are far better, and easily 3x faster if you can afford the 15w TDP budget.
- maaarghk 11y ago
  Oh wow, nice. I've been buying quite a lot of stuff from AliExpress recently, it's great. But for some reason I've never noticed these. I imagine they would make pretty great media servers/homebrew set-top boxes. Does anyone have any idea what those connectors hanging about on the inside (last image) might be?
  - codinghorror 11y ago
    for a traditional SATA drive. It has two M.2 ports for internal SSDs.
    - maaarghk 11y ago
      Great, so could fire a (multi-)terabyte drive in there and use it as a set-top box. Thanks for posting, yet another project to go on the unending list.. :)
sliken 11y ago
Sad that they skipped wifi, then ignored the ubiquity edgerouter, at least 2 of which are cheaper than what they reviewed.
- jagermo 11y ago
  I'm getting the edgerouter for my home network, looking forward to see what it can do.
sana002 11y ago
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rglullis 11y ago
So, I have a circa-2012, dual core atom machine with 2GB of RAM. It has two ethernet ports and six SATA. I was using it as a NAS, but apparently one of the SATA controllers went bust. The author mentions that he was specifically looking for the newer celerons. Any specific reason? Just because of OpenVPN? Wouldn't such an atom machine be able to handle this load? What about if I set it up to have the VPN only for torrents, for example?
- ThatPlayer 11y ago
  >Just because of OpenVPN? Wouldn't such an atom machine be able to handle this load? Newer processors will have hardware to do AES, you can look it up on ark.intel.com where it is called Intel AES New Instructions. You probably want this on a slower processor such as a Celeron if you're planning to do OpenVPN.
dzhiurgis 11y ago
swapping in new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with increasing Internet speeds available in the area upgraded from 1.5-9mbps traditional T1 connections to 50mbps coax (cable) Easter Europe is laughing at you
deleted 11y ago
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omginternets 11y ago
This article has spawned a few questions. My apartment building is hooked up to a fiber optics line, and it enters my living room through a coax cable. I'm still using the stock router, and the performance has been absolutely abysmal. In short, my connection gets dropped entirely for minutes at a time. I'll usually get 20 minutes of internet, and then 2-5 minutes of outage. Here's the rub: I have more devices than the normal person: - 1x home-built NAS, via ethernet - 1x desktop, via ethernet - 1x laptop, again via wifi - 1x mobile phone, via wifi Could the outages be due to having an under-powered router? Are there any simple tests I could run to diagnose the problem further? Off the top of my head, the usual internet speed-test battery indicates that my performance behaves as advertised, so it would seem that the problem isn't with the fiber line per se. A related question: the article here left me a bit confused. Did the author end up finding a router that could take a coaxial input?
- mseebach 11y ago
  Apparently (this is second hand knowledge), the thermal design of cheap consumer routers is really poor (because a sleek package + no fans is a priority, along with low cost), and this somehow causes the device to degrade over time. It's beyond my understanding exactly how this degradation works (I thought digital things either worked or not), but it appears to be a thing. FWIW, four devices might be slight more than a normal single person has, but it's definitely less than an average modern family reasonably has: 1 smartphone + 1 tablet per person, a smart TV (and/or AppleTV/Chromecast/Fire), a Sonos or two, a couple of laptops etc, plus whatever guests bring along.
  - omginternets 11y ago
    I suspect there's a question of load as well. I quite certainly use more bandwidth than the average family: I average 2048 bps down.
    - maaarghk 11y ago
      600-odd meg a month then?
jagermo 11y ago
I thought about building a new router myself, but I decided against it. Two reasons: i could not hit the price point of a off-the-shelf-solution and I was worried about energy efficiency. However I switched from consumer gear to a more professional stuff, using Unifi APs as wireless APs and a n EdgeRouter X as router - the four available gigabit-ports are enough to support the network.
anon4 11y ago
What about MikroTik?
riobard 11y ago
Is there anyway to make a router using just a single port ethernet? I'd like to have an Intel NUC to act as the main router, but it has only a single ethernet port.
- skrause 11y ago
  You could buy a simple USB-to-Ethernet adapter like this one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00M77HMU0/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00M77HMU0/
  - StuffMaster 11y ago
    I don't know, it seems like running a router over USB kinda defeats the point.
- mwpmaybe 11y ago
  There are some dual-LAN mini-PCs available, although I'm not sure if Intel makes one. You have several options. I use one of these[0] flashed to FreeBSD (pfSense), but it will run Linux if that's what you prefer. 0. http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-VE-2440.aspx http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-VE-2440.aspx
- kijiki 11y ago
  Netgear has a cheap 5 port switch (GS105e, IIRC) that can do VLANs and trunking. There also have larger models. You'd configure the switch port that the router is plugged into as a trunk, and then configure the other 4 switch ports as untagged in different VLANs (say, 101 for port 1, 102 for port 2, and so on). On the router side, you can use vconfig to create VLAN subinterfaces for each VLAN. You'd end up with eth0.101, eth0.102, and so on. You then just ignore eth0 on the router, and use eth0.# interfaces as stand-ins for the various switch ports. You can put them in Linux bridges, route to and from them, and so on. This is internally how most cheap wireless routers work. The CPU has only 1 or 2 ethernet interfaces, and an small onboard switch chip. Link level things like LLDP and STP may or may not work right with this config, depending on exactly how the switch chip (on board on a cheap wireless router, in the netgear switch for this DIY version). But most home and small business routers don't support LLDP and STP anyway.
vlucas 11y ago
This article makes me glad I purchased a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 a year or so ago :)
oliwarner 11y ago
I don't want a 17W Celeron on all day, every day. I want something like an ARM Cortex-A57. Powerful (and possibly well beyond 17W) but with "big.little" cores that just turn off in low load situations. When is the ARM universe going to get serious about desktop-style construction? The chips are getting fast enough for anything now so they're going to have to end this ridiculous throwaway culture soon. How about standard memory and accessory slots for starters. Something I can upgrade when I want faster network.
- microcolonel 11y ago
  There are standard-ish ARM boards with standard DIMMs. They're just quite pricey.
  - oliwarner 11y ago
    Fair point. That is of course probably the bit I want most. Massive mass production to the point where it competes with the current integrated (throwaway) market.
- rashkov 11y ago
  Interesting point. Any reason that 17W is too high for you? I'm thinking about cost but that is maybe $15 a year. Are there other considerations?
lnvd 11y ago
It sure is easy to throw lots of CPU processing power at the problem and get a fast router. But for $40 less, the Nighthawk additionally includes 2 WiFi chips, a whole lot of software engineering and a probably much lower power consumption due to specialized hardware e.g. for NAT offloading.
spb 11y ago
How would performance stack up versus the consumer routers if you just used a Raspberry Pi B+ / Zero, with additional network interfaces added via USB?

185 points by ghosh 11y ago

Everything that's old is new again. Raise your hand if this is how you first got into Linux. I needed to share a spectacularly slow DSL line with my college roommates. Soultion? Cobble together a router out of a cheap Pentium box, a PCI DSL modem, a 10mbit ISA nic, and Debian. Oh, and a couple of days of tinkering. Ah ipchains. Those were the days.

kchoudhu 11y ago
I started with a Linux, but eventually moved on to FreeBSD. I learned more about network technologies mucking around with an edge router then I ever did in my CS networking class. It's been an interesting decade.
mwpmaybe 11y ago
Yup, had a 486 running Slackware and a Pentium running Windows (FWG? 95?) and wanted to be able to share a single, always-on dial-up connection between them. I asked for a hub (with a 10Base2 BNC hookup and four 10BaseT ports) for my 15th or 16th birthday and found a 10Base2 ISA card for the 486 and a 10BaseT PCI card for the Pentium and went to town with ipchains, ppp, the whole nine yards. Good times. In retrospect, I was very fortunate to have access to not only one but two computers, dial-up Internet, and a second phone line. It didn't seem like it at the time because my friends were getting ISDN lines. So many hours spent on IRC learning about Linux...
jlgaddis 11y ago
> Raise your hand if this is how you first got into Linux. _raises hand_ In my case, I had my existing desktop PC and acquired another (used) one. Broadband hadn't yet made it to the rural area I lived and I got tired of moving the phone line back and forth between the two PCs. I was able to find a pair of (very well supported) 3c509s and a crossover cable and managed to build my first network and get both machines online at the same time. 20+ years later, I'm still doing pretty much the same thing, progressing from ipfwadm to ipchains to iptables (on Linux) to pf (on OpenBSD). And, of course, the little dedicated machine flinging my packets nowadays is much faster than I could have ever imagined back then.
- mwpmaybe 11y ago
  Oh man, ipfwadm, I completely forgot about that. I also now remember an ipmasq command, which google reminds me was kind of a wrapper around ipfwadm or ipchains, and I remember rebuilding my kernel over and over again (overnight!) to get the right combination of networking options. I also remember being very frustrated when I had to drop ipfwadm and learn ipchains for kernel 2.2, and drop ipchains and learn iptables for kernel 2.4!
  - jlgaddis 11y ago
    Yep, so much relief when 2.6 came out and retained iptables!
    - sneak 11y ago
      I also recall doing the same sort of dance with linux kernel RAID, (0.90 vs md-style) and also encrypted block devices (cryptoloop to device mapper). It's nice to remember and realize how stable and performant things are these days.
dwightgunning 11y ago
Yeah, one of the first linux distros I touched was IPcop.
kalleboo 11y ago
We were a Mac household, so to share the 56K dialup modem over our home LocalTalk network, I dusted off my Centris 660AV and configured the Mac's IP stack to do the routing using IPNetRouter[0] and wrote a couple of remote command AppleScripts so you could tell the modem to dial, hang up or return status. The Macs of those days had RAM Disk support in the ROM so I copied the whole OS onto a RAM disk and unplugged the SCSI drive when it rebooted to create a nice solid-state router. [0] http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_ipr_overview.html http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_ipr_overview.html
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
wiredfool 11y ago
I remember setting up nat/firewall/routers for my office using cast off desktop machines, a linux on a floppy distro, and a couple of 3com network cards. They may have even been 486 machines, since I was taking what I could get. The IT people were impressed with the security of being able to flip the write protect on the floppy. And the speed, once it was running completely from memory. Less so on the process to make a change. At the time, they were running out of ip addresses because every desktop was allocated a public ip.
ascorbic 11y ago
I decided I should use OpenBSD as I'd heard it was really secure. This was 2000. The old machine it was going on had an unsupported NIC, so my first experience of OpenBSD was trying to install drivers from CD. It then literally took a week to compile everything. Happy days. I was so pleased with myself that I bought pufferfish stickers to put on it.
ngoede 11y ago
Haha, yeah I shared a dial up connection for a bit of all things. Then when my family got @Home cable internet it was much better for that.
TheWoodsy 11y ago
/me puts hand up. Oh the tinkering. 56k POTS, IPChains, Them dodgy Intel NIC's, ADSL PPPoE, IPTables, Bonding, 802.1q VLANs, DSCP tc classes, Squid, Bind, MRTG, Cacti, IMQ Ingress Shaping kernel patch, Radius, Sendmail. I could go on for hours. You break it? You fix it! Best self-schooling I'd ever had.
acheron 11y ago
Same here, though we did it with FreeBSD, not Linux. If you've never tried to "make buildworld" on FreeBSD on a Pentium 75, you can try it next time you have a spare couple days.
qb45 11y ago
Debian? ipchains? I assigned IP addresses, installed the Microsoft Internet Connection Sharing Service and called it a day :) /me retracts the hand and runs away from flying rocks
- mwpmaybe 11y ago
  That's two for flinching!
tonyarkles 11y ago
I scratch-built a minimal linux distro that had NE2000 support and ipchains. It fit on a single bootable floppy. Through high school, I sold the discs for $100 each, with the promise that it'd take whatever old junk computer you had kicking around and turn it into a reliable router. Paid for my first computer that way!

Cyphus 11y ago

> As far as the routers are concerned, there's no difference between maintaining connections to thousands of individual IP addresses or just to thousands of ports on the same IP address. Has anyone tested this? It makes intuitive sense, but things are often surprising in the performance/optimization world.

NetStrikeForce 11y ago
As far as routers are concerned, that's mostly true. If the router has a big routing table and packets are coming from different sources, it may have to spend some time looking up those routes, but that's one of its core competences anyway :) There are going to be, however, many people out there throttling 10k simultaneous connections from the same host, while they wouldn't bat an eye for 20k simultaneous connections coming from 2k different hosts in total.

xuhu 11y ago

Spoiler: the homebrew solution didn't have WiFi. Unless your LAN is servers-only, how much of an option is no-WiFi these days ?

kchoudhu 11y ago
hostapd is a wonderful thing.
lultimouomo 11y ago
Not that it would be hard to add and configure; the only problem would be that WiFi PC card offer a much shorter range than APs. OP used Ubiquiti APs, directly managed from the homebrew router. Seems a sensible solution.
- throwaway7767 11y ago
  > Not that it would be hard to add and configure; the only problem would be that WiFi PC card offer a much shorter range than APs. They generally use the same cards, it's having proper antennas that makes the most difference.
jevinskie 11y ago
The author mentions using WiFi APs, basically Ethernet<>WiFi bridges. I've been envisioning a deployment exactly like this myself.
SG- 11y ago
I think investing in faster non-wireless router is better with wireless technology changing every few years where you can simply add on wireless only solutions like Ubiquiti's Unifi for only $69.
- 746F7475 11y ago
  Assuming you have wired connections to begin with. I live in an older apartment complex which was build in early 70s and there is only very poor copper connection, so I can get at most 8Mbs in through that. Slow speeds have forced me to look for alternative solutions and 4G LTE is the way to go here, it costs just shy of twice my old setup, but I get 80-100Mbs in and out, which is 10 times as fast, but being on 4G means I can need my router/modem/thing to be 4G enabled and while my main PC is connected to that router via Ethernet most of my devices use WLAN (things like chromecasts, phones, tables, and laptops). Maybe I'm in very tiny minority here, but just saying things aren't always as simple.

jevinskie 11y ago

This article has motivated me to do this for my parents. They are plagued by wireless reliability problems. I added another WiFi router at the other end of the house and bridged over Ethernet (it was a PITA to configure bridging in the extension router's firmware). I'm not even sure if it helps, though I did ensure that the two APs are operating on the two least-noisy channels. I regularly have connectivity problems when I visit, and feel bad that they have to deal with it on a regular basis. Updating to newer consumer routers has only offered marginal improvements. Their house actually has acquired quite a bit of CAT 5E runs to the far corners, so I'm thinking about getting them a router (small x64 machine as described in the blog post), a gigabit Ethernet switch, and some Ethernet-connected WiFi APs around the house. Does anyone have experience with Ubiquiti APs? They seem to understand that they exist primarily to bridge WiFi and Ethernet, not solve every networking related problem on Earth. I have to say, my WiFi experience at the office improved dramatically after the AirPorts and Cisco APs were tossed for Ubiquiti...

lstamour 11y ago
Can't speak to the APs as I was waiting for a month for them to come back in stock (the AC Pro variant) but I really like my little EdgeRouter X. Doesn't fully cover fair QoS to prevent bufferbloat since it can only handle about 200Mbps in software and the hardware doesn't kick in unless QoS is disabled, afaik. But you practically have to pay a thousand bucks or build your own router to get that these days, I just wanted something simple, fast, secure and cheap and the EdgeRouter X fit the bill. Attached a Google OnHub when those went on sale back in December. Edit: By simple I mean advanced but with um, guided templates. Unlike Ubiquiti, the OnHub is actually simple.
NickNameNick 11y ago
We used them at work, huge improvement over what we had before. And our office ops guy decided to buy one for home.
voltagex_ 11y ago
It doesn't make a lot of difference to the deployment, but I don't think the situation in http://libertybsd.net/ubiquiti/ http://libertybsd.net/ubiquiti/ has changed Edit: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unifi-made-me-realize-how-terrible-consumer-wi-fi-gear-is/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unifi... is a pretty great review, though.

microcolonel 11y ago

I have a similar box with OpenBSD which I've been running for about five years now. No hiccups or pain. Added the Ubiquiti APs last year when I started wanting wireless. I could possibly replace the hardware to cover the next five years of power consumption difference though. That's not so much an issue with the new little Celerons though.

voltagex_ 11y ago

11 days ago, I bought a new $200 ADSL2/Wifi router. 10 days ago I was moved on to a fibre connection (yay!). This has removed the need for the very specific Broadcom ADSL chip/DAC that I needed to maintain a stable connection. The particular router I'm using has a 2.6.36 based kernel and some of the worst web UI work I've seen, not to mention a very unstable version of udhcpd. With my new net connection all I need is something that has an Ethernet card and can do a PPPoE handshake - now to find an ARM box with 4+ gigabit NICs...

mwpmaybe 11y ago

Just a quick shout-out for pfSense as an excellent router OS. I've been playing around with ClearOS, DD-WRT, m0n0wall, Smoothwall, Shorewall, etc. (as well as many of my own home-grown solutions) for years and nothing even comes close to the features and performance offered by pfSense. DD-WRT is close but you're extremely limited in terms of the hardware it will run on (think WRT54G/L units with ancient processors and 16MB RAM). Not to dismiss all those other efforts but pfSense is at least worth a try. The writer of this article seems to disregard it off the bat but it's worth the time investment if you're looking for something secure and stable with features like Snort, VPN, traffic shaping, country blocking, DNSBL... the list goes on and on! Plus, it gave me an excuse to finally get my feet wet with FreeBSD. :-)

jlgaddis 11y ago
pfSense is a good operating system and provides a nice pointy-clicky interface for configuration. I'll give it that. I was a bit turned off by how they yanked the pfsense-tools repository and then put in some restrictions on access to it. (Jim: There's no need to reply and have the same conversation yet again. I'm well aware of what your reasons for doing so were and you are well within your rights to do it; we don't have to agree with it or like it, though.)
- bcook 11y ago
  pfSense-tools is no longer used in pfSense 2.3 (which is in beta). https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1842 https://blog.pfsense.org/?p=1842
- pyvpx 11y ago
  pfSense is FreeBSD with a clunky web interface that does some "magic" with PHP using XML. now, that characterization won't be as accurate in the future (I'm genuinely curious to see what happens with python, dpdk, and other things they've mentioned/hinted at) but let's be entirely honest here: it's FreeBSD with a web interface and a support company behind it.
  - mwpmaybe 11y ago

SG- 11y ago

I would have also liked to see how the routers performed with QoS enabled since that really seems to strain them even more.

esaym 11y ago

I run Shorewall on Debian hosted on top of xen on a dual core Atom. This is for my home. I dont think I would run that at an office though.l

Tomte 11y ago

I fondly remember fli4fl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fli4l https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fli4l).

codinghorror 11y ago

Just as a PSA, there are zillions of _very_ nice $300-$350 15w TDP Broadwell x86 boxes, with 4-8GB RAM, 64/128GB SSD, bundled WiFi, and dual gigabit ethernet ports on aliexpress. I don't know why there are so many broadwell boxes on offer, but these are a stellar deal for the price, and are fully solid state, super flexible, extremely fast anything x86 boxes. For example: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fanless-i5-Mini-PC-Windows-Barebone-PC-Broadwell-Intell-Core-i5-5200U-2-7GHz-4K-HTPC/32366202925.html http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fanless-i5-Mini-PC-Windows-Ba... I initally looked on Amazon and found the fitlet-i, which is nice for a 4.5w TDP AMD box.. http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/specifications/fitlet-models-specifications/ http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/specifications/fitlet-mod... .. but these aliexpress deals are far better, and easily 3x faster if you can afford the 15w TDP budget.

maaarghk 11y ago
Oh wow, nice. I've been buying quite a lot of stuff from AliExpress recently, it's great. But for some reason I've never noticed these. I imagine they would make pretty great media servers/homebrew set-top boxes. Does anyone have any idea what those connectors hanging about on the inside (last image) might be?
- codinghorror 11y ago
  for a traditional SATA drive. It has two M.2 ports for internal SSDs.
  - maaarghk 11y ago
    Great, so could fire a (multi-)terabyte drive in there and use it as a set-top box. Thanks for posting, yet another project to go on the unending list.. :)

sliken 11y ago

Sad that they skipped wifi, then ignored the ubiquity edgerouter, at least 2 of which are cheaper than what they reviewed.

jagermo 11y ago
I'm getting the edgerouter for my home network, looking forward to see what it can do.

sana002 11y ago

visit my blog http://fullmovie65.blogspot.com/2016/01/airlift-2016-full-hindi-movie-watch.html http://fullmovie65.blogspot.com/2016/01/airlift-2016-full-hi...

rglullis 11y ago

So, I have a circa-2012, dual core atom machine with 2GB of RAM. It has two ethernet ports and six SATA. I was using it as a NAS, but apparently one of the SATA controllers went bust. The author mentions that he was specifically looking for the newer celerons. Any specific reason? Just because of OpenVPN? Wouldn't such an atom machine be able to handle this load? What about if I set it up to have the VPN only for torrents, for example?

ThatPlayer 11y ago
>Just because of OpenVPN? Wouldn't such an atom machine be able to handle this load? Newer processors will have hardware to do AES, you can look it up on ark.intel.com where it is called Intel AES New Instructions. You probably want this on a slower processor such as a Celeron if you're planning to do OpenVPN.

dzhiurgis 11y ago

swapping in new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with increasing Internet speeds available in the area upgraded from 1.5-9mbps traditional T1 connections to 50mbps coax (cable) Easter Europe is laughing at you

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

omginternets 11y ago

This article has spawned a few questions. My apartment building is hooked up to a fiber optics line, and it enters my living room through a coax cable. I'm still using the stock router, and the performance has been absolutely abysmal. In short, my connection gets dropped entirely for minutes at a time. I'll usually get 20 minutes of internet, and then 2-5 minutes of outage. Here's the rub: I have more devices than the normal person: - 1x home-built NAS, via ethernet - 1x desktop, via ethernet - 1x laptop, again via wifi - 1x mobile phone, via wifi Could the outages be due to having an under-powered router? Are there any simple tests I could run to diagnose the problem further? Off the top of my head, the usual internet speed-test battery indicates that my performance behaves as advertised, so it would seem that the problem isn't with the fiber line per se. A related question: the article here left me a bit confused. Did the author end up finding a router that could take a coaxial input?

mseebach 11y ago
Apparently (this is second hand knowledge), the thermal design of cheap consumer routers is really poor (because a sleek package + no fans is a priority, along with low cost), and this somehow causes the device to degrade over time. It's beyond my understanding exactly how this degradation works (I thought digital things either worked or not), but it appears to be a thing. FWIW, four devices might be slight more than a normal single person has, but it's definitely less than an average modern family reasonably has: 1 smartphone + 1 tablet per person, a smart TV (and/or AppleTV/Chromecast/Fire), a Sonos or two, a couple of laptops etc, plus whatever guests bring along.
- omginternets 11y ago
  I suspect there's a question of load as well. I quite certainly use more bandwidth than the average family: I average 2048 bps down.
  - maaarghk 11y ago
    600-odd meg a month then?

jagermo 11y ago

I thought about building a new router myself, but I decided against it. Two reasons: i could not hit the price point of a off-the-shelf-solution and I was worried about energy efficiency. However I switched from consumer gear to a more professional stuff, using Unifi APs as wireless APs and a n EdgeRouter X as router - the four available gigabit-ports are enough to support the network.

anon4 11y ago

What about MikroTik?

riobard 11y ago

Is there anyway to make a router using just a single port ethernet? I'd like to have an Intel NUC to act as the main router, but it has only a single ethernet port.

skrause 11y ago
You could buy a simple USB-to-Ethernet adapter like this one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00M77HMU0/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00M77HMU0/
- StuffMaster 11y ago
  I don't know, it seems like running a router over USB kinda defeats the point.
mwpmaybe 11y ago
There are some dual-LAN mini-PCs available, although I'm not sure if Intel makes one. You have several options. I use one of these[0] flashed to FreeBSD (pfSense), but it will run Linux if that's what you prefer. 0. http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-VE-2440.aspx http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-VE-2440.aspx
kijiki 11y ago
Netgear has a cheap 5 port switch (GS105e, IIRC) that can do VLANs and trunking. There also have larger models. You'd configure the switch port that the router is plugged into as a trunk, and then configure the other 4 switch ports as untagged in different VLANs (say, 101 for port 1, 102 for port 2, and so on). On the router side, you can use vconfig to create VLAN subinterfaces for each VLAN. You'd end up with eth0.101, eth0.102, and so on. You then just ignore eth0 on the router, and use eth0.# interfaces as stand-ins for the various switch ports. You can put them in Linux bridges, route to and from them, and so on. This is internally how most cheap wireless routers work. The CPU has only 1 or 2 ethernet interfaces, and an small onboard switch chip. Link level things like LLDP and STP may or may not work right with this config, depending on exactly how the switch chip (on board on a cheap wireless router, in the netgear switch for this DIY version). But most home and small business routers don't support LLDP and STP anyway.

vlucas 11y ago

This article makes me glad I purchased a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 a year or so ago :)

oliwarner 11y ago

I don't want a 17W Celeron on all day, every day. I want something like an ARM Cortex-A57. Powerful (and possibly well beyond 17W) but with "big.little" cores that just turn off in low load situations. When is the ARM universe going to get serious about desktop-style construction? The chips are getting fast enough for anything now so they're going to have to end this ridiculous throwaway culture soon. How about standard memory and accessory slots for starters. Something I can upgrade when I want faster network.

microcolonel 11y ago
There are standard-ish ARM boards with standard DIMMs. They're just quite pricey.
- oliwarner 11y ago
  Fair point. That is of course probably the bit I want most. Massive mass production to the point where it competes with the current integrated (throwaway) market.
rashkov 11y ago
Interesting point. Any reason that 17W is too high for you? I'm thinking about cost but that is maybe $15 a year. Are there other considerations?

lnvd 11y ago

It sure is easy to throw lots of CPU processing power at the problem and get a fast router. But for $40 less, the Nighthawk additionally includes 2 WiFi chips, a whole lot of software engineering and a probably much lower power consumption due to specialized hardware e.g. for NAT offloading.

spb 11y ago

How would performance stack up versus the consumer routers if you just used a Raspberry Pi B+ / Zero, with additional network interfaces added via USB?