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My current favorite approach to home routing is a "router in a box" setup. - 1x VLAN capable managed switch - 1x any Linux capable SBC with 1x gbit ehternet p
by megous 4y ago
My current favorite approach to home routing is a "router in a box" setup.
- 1x VLAN capable managed switch
- 1x any Linux capable SBC with 1x gbit ehternet port
- any systemd based Linux distro (I like Arch Linux ARM for this purpose)
Pretty much all the networking aside from firewall, and wifi setup can be configured via systemd-networkd/resolved these days.
Once you have your installation and setup done, if your HW gives you trouble you can always replace it with anything else you have at hand.
It's very flexible, and you can do a lot of things a typical router GUI would never allow you. It's great if you want to explore Linux networking. HW is cheap, low-power, doesn't need to be a "router" HW with multiple ports, and if anything happens you know you can replace the broken router with pretty much anything that has an ethernet port and can run a Linux distro.
- red369 4y agoThis setup sounds great - am I understanding correctly, are you describing what is also called a router-on-a-stick? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Router_on_a_stick https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Router_on_a_stick I’ve always been concerned (probably irrationally), that it seems to halve WAN bandwidth (since all traffic has to travel both in and out of the router over the same cable). Do you find this is an issue?
- megous 4y agoYes, router on a stick. :) I don't have a gigabit internet connection, but it should not be a huge issue for your typical unidirectional download or upload even on a gigabit. Ethernet is full-duplex, so you'll be able to saturate either direction (just not at once).