58 ms·

Linux-Router

146 points by marcodiego 5y ago

dsr_ 5y ago
This sort of thing is good in direct proportion to the quality of the documentation and support. If you don't know what you're doing, the fact that it works feels overwhelmingly important, but conceals the fundamental insecurity. If you do know what you're doing, do you agree with all the policy decisions being made here? Good documentation and community can bring you out of darkness. I'm not sure this is doing that job as well as OpenWRT or a good distro's user mailing list.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
marcodiego 5y ago
I occasionally use it to turn my machine into a repeater. Would be nice to have a GUI.
brian_herman 5y ago
Oh wow I could of used this a couple months ago. I tried doing this myself. But, instead bought a ASUS router maybe when my asus router decides to crap out I will replace it with this defintely bookmarking and staring.
- dnautics 5y ago
  I literally also did this two weeks ago, I repurposed an ASUS PN50 as a router. Luckily, I didn't have that much trouble and wound up refreshing my network chops a bit (using tcpdump to diagnose a dhcp server that wasn't doing what it was supposed to)... I'm considering releasing a video tut on it. My only complaint is that I think (could be wrong) download bandwidth is limited by the "upload bandwidth" on the ASUS' wifi adapter, since it's running in reverse.
ncrmro 5y ago
Trying to figure out how to make a pi or my Linux workstation an access point bridged to my network has been tedious
- m463 5y ago
  You can run openwrt on your pi and do it that way. Once you get familiar with openwrt, it does a lot of interesting things. I did it as an experiment and have a pi running openwrt as an ntp server. it's behaved very well.
  - rastafang 5y ago
    > Once you get familiar with openwrt, it does a lot of interesting things. what's your favorite feature?
    - m463 5y ago
      one really nice feature - especially for the pi - is that the filesystem is read-only and runs with an overlay filesystem from ram. This give you the ability to see what is changed or back up your changes by accessing the overlay directly. Another feature is the GUI. You can easily get started, but as you become familiar with the system, you can just edit the configuration files to change things.
- voltagex_ 5y ago
  It sucks, and it shouldn't suck. Does https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/computers/configuration.html#setting-up-a-bridged-wireless-access-point https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/computers/configur... work for you? You can email me at voltagex (at) voltagex dot org if you like.
jrm4 5y ago
Recently, I've been forced down a rabbit-hole in this space, the tl:dr of it being I have crappy internet where I live, and I've had to cobble together a multiple-ISP solution with load balancing wherein the individual ISP connections are on opposite sides of the house, and it is absurdly difficult to understand. I have a ton of old computers/equipment that I'm sure could do most of the lifting, and I'm relatively proficient in Linux et al, it's my daily driver -- but I just ended up buying a load balancing router and using multiple routers etc. It's frustrating knowing that I don't need it, but the family needed remote-work-class internet faster than I could learn how to do it my way. Hopefully well see more stuff like this because, unless I missed something big, this space is dismal
- azinman2 5y ago
  Just grab something like pfSense or any variant that will give you a GUI to do this wayyyyy more easily and with someone knowledgable configuring it and testing it.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    You are waaaay overselling pfSense :) Seriously, I tried it, and sure it's easier than hacking at iptables. But not much.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      pfSense gives you the shape of the problem and creates bounds. Being on your own in a text editor with google allows you to shoot yourself in the foot while stumbling in the dark.
      - jrm4 5y ago
        Fair comparison, but still a really low bar. It's safer, but not really any easier.
- oldie 5y ago
  I've found myself in a similar situation. What I've learnt is that good load-balancing makes a surprising difference. It won't help you back up your files to the cloud any faster, but it will keep your Internet connection usable for other people while you do so. I've gone from being unable to hold one decent Skype conversation to being able to hold two in parallel on the same network. I've gone from ping times of up to 800ms when my wife used WhatsApp to ping times below 25ms in all realistic load conditions, including WhatsApp, and even flat-out file transfers in both directions at once. For video conferencing and general Web browsing, low latency is usually more important than high bandwidth. The route I took was to place a small, low-power Linux box between my network and my ADSL router, running OpenWRT, and then configure load-balancing on that. A Web search for "bufferbloat cake" (no, really :-)) will show you one of the most useful Web sites I found. One other measure you can take is aggressive content-blocking. I use Pi-Hole, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and Blokada, and I recommend them all. If you don't have much bandwidth, you don't want to give half of it away to marketers and creepy trackers. Use what little you have to work for you, rather than against you. Having started from a position of knowing very little about Linux networking, I'd say that the Linux networking stack is powerful, flexible and fast, but it's let down by the available documentation, most of which seems to have been written at least fifteen years ago, and much of which is simply out-of-date. I couldn't find anything that just starts at the beginning and tells you everything you want to know, and is based on modern Linux commands and facilities. I'd write it myself if I understood it well enough but, honestly, I still don't. For anyone who wants to contribute to Linux but is a wordsmith rather than a coder, here's your chance.
reginold 5y ago
Are there any open source hardware internet routers? edit: found this on crowdsupply but doesn't do wi-fi https://www.crowdsupply.com/search?q=Router https://www.crowdsupply.com/search?q=Router
- oldie 5y ago
  Take a look at <https://www.gl-inet.com/ https://www.gl-inet.com/>. These boxes come with a nice, simplified GUI, but will run stock OpenWRT, which you can build yourself if you wish. I placed one of these boxes behind my ADSL router to do load-balancing. To use it as an Internet router, you'd instead need to couple it with a modem. A colleague whom I trust recommends Draytek kit but (a) I've not tried it, (b) it's not cheap and (c) I'm just a stranger on the Internet, so read around carefully before splashing out.
  - dicknuckle 5y ago
    i didn't realize it, but it seems they provide the bootloader sources which most "open source routers" don't. If they also provide the full board schematics then I would consider them completely open source.
    - dbuder 5y ago
      imo it is rude to ask for schematics, the experience in open source hardware is that the only people who use it are the vendors who copy it verbatim and then compete on price, while adding nothing. Even the bootloader is a big ask.
- voltagex_ 5y ago
  Depends on a) what your WAN connection is and b) how open you need it to be (i.e. there are no open hardware wifi cards) My WAN port is Ethernet (the GPON conversion is done in a box I don't control). This has the advantage that pretty much any OpenWRT router will work. I currently use a Traverse Ten64 (disclosure: received the unit for free as part of a beta test) which works reasonably well. You could also look at gl-inet as someone else has mentioned, or the Turris range of routers. I would not be bothering with flashing a commercial router with OpenWRT anymore.
SrslyJosh 5y ago
This could be a nice reference implementation.
teleforce 5y ago
Wow this looks very promising and it shows that the author spent many hours developing and refining the scripts. This can be easily incorporated into a guide book as a long awaited replacement for Tony Mancill's Linux Router book that's long overdue from 2002 [1]. Kudos Gary, I wished I can buy you a coffee, do you accept PayPal ;-) [1]Linux Routers: A Primer for Network Administrators (2nd Edition): https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6314 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6314

146 points by marcodiego 5y ago

dsr_ 5y ago

This sort of thing is good in direct proportion to the quality of the documentation and support. If you don't know what you're doing, the fact that it works feels overwhelmingly important, but conceals the fundamental insecurity. If you do know what you're doing, do you agree with all the policy decisions being made here? Good documentation and community can bring you out of darkness. I'm not sure this is doing that job as well as OpenWRT or a good distro's user mailing list.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

marcodiego 5y ago

I occasionally use it to turn my machine into a repeater. Would be nice to have a GUI.

brian_herman 5y ago

Oh wow I could of used this a couple months ago. I tried doing this myself. But, instead bought a ASUS router maybe when my asus router decides to crap out I will replace it with this defintely bookmarking and staring.

dnautics 5y ago
I literally also did this two weeks ago, I repurposed an ASUS PN50 as a router. Luckily, I didn't have that much trouble and wound up refreshing my network chops a bit (using tcpdump to diagnose a dhcp server that wasn't doing what it was supposed to)... I'm considering releasing a video tut on it. My only complaint is that I think (could be wrong) download bandwidth is limited by the "upload bandwidth" on the ASUS' wifi adapter, since it's running in reverse.

ncrmro 5y ago

Trying to figure out how to make a pi or my Linux workstation an access point bridged to my network has been tedious

m463 5y ago
You can run openwrt on your pi and do it that way. Once you get familiar with openwrt, it does a lot of interesting things. I did it as an experiment and have a pi running openwrt as an ntp server. it's behaved very well.
- rastafang 5y ago
  > Once you get familiar with openwrt, it does a lot of interesting things. what's your favorite feature?
  - m463 5y ago
    one really nice feature - especially for the pi - is that the filesystem is read-only and runs with an overlay filesystem from ram. This give you the ability to see what is changed or back up your changes by accessing the overlay directly. Another feature is the GUI. You can easily get started, but as you become familiar with the system, you can just edit the configuration files to change things.
voltagex_ 5y ago
It sucks, and it shouldn't suck. Does https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/computers/configuration.html#setting-up-a-bridged-wireless-access-point https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/computers/configur... work for you? You can email me at voltagex (at) voltagex dot org if you like.

jrm4 5y ago

Recently, I've been forced down a rabbit-hole in this space, the tl:dr of it being I have crappy internet where I live, and I've had to cobble together a multiple-ISP solution with load balancing wherein the individual ISP connections are on opposite sides of the house, and it is absurdly difficult to understand. I have a ton of old computers/equipment that I'm sure could do most of the lifting, and I'm relatively proficient in Linux et al, it's my daily driver -- but I just ended up buying a load balancing router and using multiple routers etc. It's frustrating knowing that I don't need it, but the family needed remote-work-class internet faster than I could learn how to do it my way. Hopefully well see more stuff like this because, unless I missed something big, this space is dismal

azinman2 5y ago
Just grab something like pfSense or any variant that will give you a GUI to do this wayyyyy more easily and with someone knowledgable configuring it and testing it.
- jrm4 5y ago
  You are waaaay overselling pfSense :) Seriously, I tried it, and sure it's easier than hacking at iptables. But not much.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    pfSense gives you the shape of the problem and creates bounds. Being on your own in a text editor with google allows you to shoot yourself in the foot while stumbling in the dark.
    - jrm4 5y ago
      Fair comparison, but still a really low bar. It's safer, but not really any easier.
oldie 5y ago
I've found myself in a similar situation. What I've learnt is that good load-balancing makes a surprising difference. It won't help you back up your files to the cloud any faster, but it will keep your Internet connection usable for other people while you do so. I've gone from being unable to hold one decent Skype conversation to being able to hold two in parallel on the same network. I've gone from ping times of up to 800ms when my wife used WhatsApp to ping times below 25ms in all realistic load conditions, including WhatsApp, and even flat-out file transfers in both directions at once. For video conferencing and general Web browsing, low latency is usually more important than high bandwidth. The route I took was to place a small, low-power Linux box between my network and my ADSL router, running OpenWRT, and then configure load-balancing on that. A Web search for "bufferbloat cake" (no, really :-)) will show you one of the most useful Web sites I found. One other measure you can take is aggressive content-blocking. I use Pi-Hole, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and Blokada, and I recommend them all. If you don't have much bandwidth, you don't want to give half of it away to marketers and creepy trackers. Use what little you have to work for you, rather than against you. Having started from a position of knowing very little about Linux networking, I'd say that the Linux networking stack is powerful, flexible and fast, but it's let down by the available documentation, most of which seems to have been written at least fifteen years ago, and much of which is simply out-of-date. I couldn't find anything that just starts at the beginning and tells you everything you want to know, and is based on modern Linux commands and facilities. I'd write it myself if I understood it well enough but, honestly, I still don't. For anyone who wants to contribute to Linux but is a wordsmith rather than a coder, here's your chance.

reginold 5y ago

Are there any open source hardware internet routers? edit: found this on crowdsupply but doesn't do wi-fi https://www.crowdsupply.com/search?q=Router https://www.crowdsupply.com/search?q=Router

oldie 5y ago
Take a look at <https://www.gl-inet.com/ https://www.gl-inet.com/>. These boxes come with a nice, simplified GUI, but will run stock OpenWRT, which you can build yourself if you wish. I placed one of these boxes behind my ADSL router to do load-balancing. To use it as an Internet router, you'd instead need to couple it with a modem. A colleague whom I trust recommends Draytek kit but (a) I've not tried it, (b) it's not cheap and (c) I'm just a stranger on the Internet, so read around carefully before splashing out.
- dicknuckle 5y ago
  i didn't realize it, but it seems they provide the bootloader sources which most "open source routers" don't. If they also provide the full board schematics then I would consider them completely open source.
  - dbuder 5y ago
    imo it is rude to ask for schematics, the experience in open source hardware is that the only people who use it are the vendors who copy it verbatim and then compete on price, while adding nothing. Even the bootloader is a big ask.
voltagex_ 5y ago
Depends on a) what your WAN connection is and b) how open you need it to be (i.e. there are no open hardware wifi cards) My WAN port is Ethernet (the GPON conversion is done in a box I don't control). This has the advantage that pretty much any OpenWRT router will work. I currently use a Traverse Ten64 (disclosure: received the unit for free as part of a beta test) which works reasonably well. You could also look at gl-inet as someone else has mentioned, or the Turris range of routers. I would not be bothering with flashing a commercial router with OpenWRT anymore.

SrslyJosh 5y ago

This could be a nice reference implementation.

teleforce 5y ago

Wow this looks very promising and it shows that the author spent many hours developing and refining the scripts. This can be easily incorporated into a guide book as a long awaited replacement for Tony Mancill's Linux Router book that's long overdue from 2002 [1]. Kudos Gary, I wished I can buy you a coffee, do you accept PayPal ;-) [1]Linux Routers: A Primer for Network Administrators (2nd Edition): https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6314 https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6314