6 ms·
A tiny PC as a router
- znpy 10y agoI once used the IpCop Linux dostro and was utterly amazed by how well it worked.
- TobbenTM 10y agoIPCop is really great, but for some (like me) it may be too focused on security vs convenience, with no upnp etc. After using IPCop for roughly 4 years, I have now moved to Sophos UTM Home [1], and couldn't be happier. Much easier to use, and supports upnp. [1]: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-utm-home-edition.aspx https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-utm-...
- arpa 10y ago8 gigs of RAM? SSD disk? 2.4GHz (incorrectly stated as MHz)? factory image is 4 GB in size? All this for a router? I'm no expert by any metric, but that's one hell of an overkill IMHO. Shit, dude, my home pc is weaker in almost all aspects and I play video games and HD content on that, in addition to network stuff. In my day, a router was a Intel Pentium @90MHz with 4M of RAM. No HDD, only a FDD with Linux. Granted, it probably would have problems today with speeds we're all used to and WLAN, but, man, strip it down, strip it all down to Megs. You don't need X running on that. You don't need all these services. Fonts. Libraries. Default pictures. That's all bloat. Throw out the SDD. A 1G usb thumb drive is enough. I/O speed concerns? You got 8 gigs of ram, dude, you could fit your whole "factory" image in it and have enough space for the second one. Ramdisk the shit out the system. Dude... And, just out of curiosity, how does using iptables make that not a real firewall (even if you're using iptables in an indirect manner)?
- icebraining 10y agoThrow out the SDD. A 1G usb thumb drive is enough. Agreed, though if you do, you have to be careful with writes. I literally had to reflash my drive every time the power went out (I don't have an UPS). My solution was to move every writable directory to a tmpfs, then mount the root fs as readonly. Logs get shipped by a cron job over ssh. It's been rock-solid ever since. If you want to upgrade or reconfigure without reflashing, you can still remount with rw, do your thing and then remount with ro again.
- fnj 10y agoOr, rather than going through all that rigmarole, just use an SSD. If you want to save money, get a really cheap one. You can easily get a 60 GB SSD for $30.
- icebraining 10y agoWell, it's not like filesystems in SSDs never get corrupt when power goes off. And the USB stick is helpful if you need to mount it on a laptop, for example if you fucked up the firewall rules and you're now unable to SSH in :)
- arpa 10y agoOr, alternatively, just use that USB drive for bootup and continue running purely in ram.
- sofaofthedamned 10y agoI've got pretty much the same hardware but it's got 2xSSDs for iscsi storage. It didn't cost too much and it's flexible - running Ubuntu server I can stick some Docker containers on it, run a/v for the network, Nagios, anything really. It's a good learning exercise too when you consider anything that impacts my son accessing XBox Live is essentially mission-critical in this house. When I replaced my ISP supplied router with it (BT Home Hub 5) I immediately saw better performance and less latency. Unfortunately I forgot they deliver their premium sport channels over IPTV/Multicast so it was a couple of days learning that but i've acquired a new skill for my CV, so hey-ho. BTW if the processor is like mine the 2.4ghz thing is the burst clock, it normally idles are 800mhz, which is important as the box is fanless.
- baronseng 10y agoI feel somthing like this is much cheaper for that purpose http://www.pipo-store.com/pipo-x9-tv-box-8-9-inch-mini-pc.html http://www.pipo-store.com/pipo-x9-tv-box-8-9-inch-mini-pc.ht...
- dom0 10y agoWasteful use of the hardware, which could easily do routing and network storage and some services for a smaller office.
- corv 10y agoI'm using a Qotom based OPNsense router. Its 4 Intel GigE do Multi-WAN admirably. HardenedBSD and LibreSSL let me sleep well at night. It's not more expensive than a high end consumer router and significantly more capable. It's been running for several months now but gets relatively warm due to passive cooling. I wonder how long it will last.
- vincentkriek 10y agoWhat made you choose OPNsense instead of pfsense?
- corv 10y agoThe ability to use pkg made customization much easier. They are both good.
- amq 10y agoAn alternative: https://omnia.turris.cz/en/ https://omnia.turris.cz/en/ (just in other direction: a powerful router as a tiny PC / home server).
- cpach 10y agoI guess the primary benefit of using something like Edgerouter Lite[1] is that you get an efficient router for half the price (perhaps even less). [1] Available e.g. here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0XP-000A-00001 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0XP-000A-000...
- pyvpx 10y agoit's efficient because the fast path is a very closed-source binary blob running on the hardware. anything the binary blob doesn't support, is going to be "software switched" as it is commonly called.
- cpach 10y agoYep. Does anyone know if there are fully open source solutions that can compare to the performance/price of Edgerouter & Co?
- narrowrail 10y agoWell, you could put Gentoo on your ERL-3: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MIPS/ERLite-3 https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MIPS/ERLite-3
- rufius 10y agoMy understanding is without the binary blob, no. That's where the magic happens.
- fnj 10y agoYes, it's a valid option, but it's opaque closed source, and dumbed down with GUI crap for the clueless.
- lightbulbjim 10y agoNope, EdgeOS is a fork of VyOS, based on Debian. There is a GUI, but there's also a CLI which exposes a lot more functionality. You can even install standard Debian packages via Apt. See https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/categories/200321064-EdgeMAX https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/categories/200321064-EdgeMAX
- zaggynl 10y agoThose tiny PCs are nice for projects like this, I use a Jetway JBC373F38-525-B with Sophos UTM. Why not using anything with a GUI like pfsense or Sophos UTM?
- fnj 10y agoConfusing "router" with "router + WiFi access point" is a pet peeve a mine. To me a router has absolutely nothing to do with WiFi, yet almost every discussion of routers presumes WiFi. I don't use WiFi much, but when I do, I use a separate box. Separation of function. Having said that, the Qotom is absolutely perfect for 1000Base-T to 1000Base-T routing. It's got plenty of CPU (unlike the commercial crap is hopelessly lacking), and plenty of RAM so it won't overflow its NAT tables.
- dsr_ 10y ago"almost every discussion of routers presumes WiFi" That would be because numerically, the majority of routers are tiny boxes sold for home use with three NICs: external ethernet, internal ethernet (often connected directly to a mini-switch), and internal WiFi. They also serve as firewalls, DHCP servers, NTP servers, and DNS relays, none of which are technically routing.
- Johnny555 10y agoA router has nothing to do with ethernet ether, but people still expect a router to have ethernet. For most home users, routing Wifi to their provider's ethernet handoff is exactly what they need a router for.
- rufius 10y agoThis is neat. I'm curious if the author has gotten to test it with a Gigabit internet connection yet? I initially intended to build my own router when I got Gigabit internet. After some research, I settled on a SOHO solution that seemed hard to beat in bang-for-buck: Ubiquiti EdgeRouter LITE-3. It does roughly 933Mbps for WAN->LAN, which means I don't lose much speed in that transition. For prebuilt solutions, the only way to one-up that is to move to 10Gbps hardware which is cost prohibitive. All that said, the Ubiquiti router runs a custom version of Debian and I'd prefer to work with something that could work with Ansible or the like and is a little more open.
- F00Fbug 10y agoFor a router, I'd pick some BSD-based OS. pf is much more efficient than iptables, although I only know this anecdotally. I'm a huge fan of pfSense which wraps a nice UI and some great tools (proxy, AV, analysis, etc.) into one big package. Worth a look. I used to run my home router on a little Qotom computer, but virtualized it to get rid of wires and boxes; works great. I'm running three pfSense boxes in various environments and can't say enough good things about 'em.
- any1 10y agoI used this for my router: http://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm http://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm No complaints yet, except pfSense is not that great with Wifi. It's probably best to do wifi separately if you want to run a BSD flavour on it. I haven't tried installing Linux on it yet, since WiFi is functioning well enough, albeit sub-optimally.
- Nursie 10y agoI do enjoy these sorts of projects but ... My router needs were recently fulfilled by a TP-Link MR3020, an old mobile phone and ROOter/GoldenOrb, an OpenWRT variant. £25 and two minutes to flash it, and away. It amazes me what OpenWRT and ROOter have crammed into 4MB. 4MB!
- windowsworkstoo 10y agoI'll add to the chorus of alternatives - I use the Mikrotik RB1100AHx2 in many many places, they scale up quite well.
- mindrunner 10y agoI am torn between getting that, or waiting for the next generation motherboards (apollo lake). 2 vendors have already made preliminary announcements: * http://www.asrock.com/ipc/overview.asp?Model=IMB-157 http://www.asrock.com/ipc/overview.asp?Model=IMB-157 * https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/J3455M-E/ https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/J3455M-E/
- dxxvi 10y agoWhat wireless adapter do you guys use? Is it as powerful as a regular router antenna?