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Build a Debian $latest firewall on an x86 box with two NICs (one upstream, one downstream/intranet). You don't need much CPU power for a router. To downstream,

Build a Debian $latest firewall on an x86 box with two NICs (one upstream, one downstream/intranet). You don't need much CPU power for a router. To downstream, connect a good switch with port mirroring. (You might want to be able to capture traffic.) Connect a wireless router as an access point or do double-NAT. Let the AP be a dispensable component, not the main component of your network.

josteink 5y ago
> Let the AP be a dispensable component, not the main component of your network. Yes. Agreed. Let routing and WiFi be 2 separate concerns handled by 2 different devices (or in the case of mesh-networking, classes of devices). > You don't need much CPU power for a router. Depends on how fast your link is. I could get decent routing on a mid-range MIPS-based device until I needed more than 300mbps. The CPU peaked and throttled traffic, because it was responsible for the NATing (ie actual routing, not just passing ethernet frames or TCP packets around untouched) After that I needed a router with support for hardware NAT-offloading and it can do 1gbps actual routing just fine. You probably don’t need to go full X86 + Debian, but depending on your needs, you may still find yourself bandwidth-limited because of CPU constraints.