9 ms·

How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)

135 points by giuliomagnifico 4y ago

totoglazer 4y ago
This is a wild Time Machine. ISA cards. 28.8 upload. Thanks for sharing.
- giuliomagnifico 4y ago
  …and the prices! He is “happy” because using those spare parts he can spend only 1300$ for a wireless router.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    It seemed reasonable at the time. I briefly used a DEC Multia with two Aironet LM4500 PCMCIA wireless cards as a point-to-point backhaul and access point. That was a lot of money for hardware but the cable company wanted tens of thousands of dollars to bring coax a very short distance to the site, and ADSL in those days was still something you could expect to deliver just 128kbps upstream under ideal conditions.
    - dtaht 4y ago
      We used to use old DEC alphas as firewalls figuring the arch was so obscure as to not worry about binary attacks.
- throwanem 4y ago
  And the single-disk router distro! In the Coyote Linux derivative I ran that for years, back in the early noughties, on the one of several beat-up parts machines I then had which could run two 3C509 cards at once - who knows how I laid hands on those, but once I got it working it was a reliable enough setup for the whole more-or-less group house whose slant-ceilinged back attic room I lived in. Unlike in the article, we were within DSL range of the nearest CO and had no load coils to worry about, so any POTS extension would do - hence being able to have the whole house's network ops up in my little garret. I had a couple of desks and tables in there plus my little twin mattress and an Ikea Poang chair - and, thanks to a long run of Cat-5 I'd somehow managed to scrounge, not only 802.11b coverage for the whole house with one of the early-model WRT-54Gs, but even rudimentary internet TV for the living room with another hacked-together beige box and an All-in-Wonder card bought used with an employee discount from the cheesy little computer store I'd spent a few months working at. We even had four-player Gauntlet with MAME and a few cheap USB 1.0 controllers. Thin times by the standards of the life I live these days, but good times, too.
  - znpy 4y ago
    Floppydistros! The memories! Booting linux on an internet café from a floppydistro because I didn’t really know what linux was and my parents wouldn’t let me try stuff on the “home computer”. What was it, coyote linux? Can’t really remember now :)
    - throwanem 4y ago
      Coyote, yeah! Same one I ran, and maybe the first time I ever actually put Linux to a useful purpose beyond satisfying my own intellectual curiosity - my first first time being a few years earlier with a Slackware floppy install on a Toshiba Tecra laptop. I had to scrape together enough disks for the A set, download and image them from the Windows 95 install, and then print out enough docs to figure out how to get dialup working again once I was done repaving the machine with a then totally unfamiliar environment - I'd bought the laptop used with summer-job money and it hadn't come with OS install media, so I either got it working or I was just SOL, with no access any longer from Tennessee to the mostly West Coast-based social circle that Internet access had made available to me, and no obvious way to recover the machine to a working state. Luckily, it didn't come to that! Good times. :D
  - dtaht 4y ago
    Ironically we never did get the VERY EXPENSIVE 20MB IDE flash drive to work, to replace the floppy disk. I still have it.
- aecay 4y ago
  And the fact that determining the true lat/long of one's location was best done by using mapquest.com (ah memories...). Unscrambled GPS for civilians didn't come along for another couple years.
  - dtaht 4y ago
    Greg had had an early idea about traffic alerts, which actually worked pretty well, but it did not monetize. I dont know when he gave up on it...
cowmix 4y ago
At the time, using KA9Q on top of DOS was also a great way to accomplish the same outcome.
- dtaht 4y ago
  Not a lot of people know that linux´s original network stack more or less came from phil karn giving permission to copy KA9Q.
uniformlyrandom 4y ago
What if I'd like to build a linux router out of modern hardware? I would like to stop upgrading routers every two years (maybe just upgrade the wifi cards in it), and have full control over router's UI (command line is fine). Is this a stupid idea?
- giuliomagnifico 4y ago
  Not a stupid idea, lots of people apre are doing it with custom machine using OpenWrt.
- throwanem 4y ago
  Not at all, although PFSense is based on BSD rather than Linux. It's incredibly full-featured (with even a complete and polished web UI) and pretty easy to configure and operate, and definitely where I'd suggest starting.
  - irfwashere 4y ago
    Yes there's a lot of good content now with guidance on setting up one of these pf or opnsense routers. Really cool stuff. And use any old router you have in AP mode and you're set!
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    OpenWRT [0] OTOH is actually Linux. Also very full featured, including a GUI (LuCI) that even though some times lags a little behind the command-line and config file stuff, is still pretty good. As another FreeBSD-based alternative, there's the PFSense fork OPNSense [1], which started out as a fork of PfSense after the Netgate takeover and complaints about their openness and support for the community. [0] https://openwrt.org/ https://openwrt.org/ [1] https://opnsense.com/ https://opnsense.com/
    - throwanem 4y ago
      Oh, I didn't know about the fork - I guess that shows how long it's been since I last ran PFSense. Good to know, thanks!
throwaway892238 4y ago
I used to build Linux router software that would fit on a floppy disk and run it in a 486DX2, for absolutely no reason except it was fun as hell. Made a nice web UI, packed in a ton of advanced features. Wanted to try and start a company to sell little open source routers, but then I found out cheap routers were quite hard to make money on, so I became a sysadmin instead and mostly browsed Slashdot for 10 years. My big regret is not becoming a musician or woodworker instead.
- hk1337 4y ago
  > Linux router software that would fit on a floppy disk and run it in a 486DX2 I thought this was me that posted this and forgot I posted it. I did this exact thing with same equipment back in college. My reasoning was slightly different. I did do it just for fun but also I wanted to run multiple computers and servers and the university was pretty strict on the one computer per connection rule.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    In the early days of consumer broadband, routers/switches were these exotic things and the cable companies absolutely would not support the configuration.
    - dtaht 4y ago
      the cable companies had no service worth a damn at the time. DSL was going to win... it really was... and the fiber folk were planning to deliver any day now...
  - dualboot 4y ago
    There are a lot of us out there.
- pengaru 4y ago
  Did something similar-ish, except using an old 386 motherboard packed to the gills with 30-pin SIMMs. Booted off 3.5" floppy into initramfs. Init was a busybox shell script (@/linuxrc IIRC) to setup ip masquerading as it was known then, then it'd deliberately panic by exiting init while the kernel kept running the network stack with no userspace. That little pile of PC debris eventually became a dialup POP for a local girl I met on IRC who was at constant war with her older brother over their shared AOL account, despite having their own computers w/phone lines. Fun times, those teen-aged years. Linux was such a game changer back then, enabling kids to deploy their own ISP if they just read the HOWTOs and collected enough computer trash.
lamontcg 4y ago
I think around 2002 I had a FreeBSD box running as a firewall/wireless router with an ath0 card (long since forgotten what that was) using a very old motherboard (might have been from a prior job in 1999 or so). Also had a Sparc 5 hanging off it which I used as a ircd and httpd server since that was just less likely to get hacked into running servers (and no cloudy anything I could buy back then).
shmerl 4y ago
Why is situation with wireless routers still so messed up? Barely anything new coming out has proper upstream Linux drivers. Broadcom chipsets are one of the worst offenders, but others are barely any better. Why can't Intel make some?
- amannm 4y ago
  device or chip manufacturers won't spend the money to develop/support/maintain in-kernel linux drivers if they don't think it will ultimately net them enough of an ROI based on sales of the corresponding device or chip. the market for non-carrier branded, end user hackable, linux based home routers is pretty small and probably shrinking as a percent of the overall market for wifi chipped devices.
  - amannm 4y ago
    informative post: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/general-hardware/1324300-linux-kernel-patches-posted-for-usb-support-with-realtek-rtw88-wifi-driver?p=1324344#post1324344 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/general-hardw...
- dtaht 4y ago
  I have tried to fix the chipsets most used in openwrt. Presently the ath9k is best supported, the mt76 is pretty good, the mt79 coming along, and the ath10k, ok. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefresh=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefr... Broadcom can roast in hell.
johnklos 4y ago
Reminds me of creating a wireless access point using an old 80486 laptop and a ORiNOCO Bronze wireless card, a pigtail and an antenna. It was for one of the first free public wireless networks in Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, New York, in 2001. The bandwidth was provided by alt.coffee, a coffee and Internet cafe. It took some convincing to get the owners of alt.coffee to let me do this because they thought it would be bad for business. I had to convince them that people who could afford laptops with wireless weren't renting their computers, but they'd likely buy coffee. It worked :) The laptop ran NetBSD and was installed in the awning of Accidental CDs a few doors down from alt.coffee because they were open 24/7, so someone was always at the front of the store. It routed its own private subnet that the NetBSD router in alt.coffee NAT'd and provided public IPv6 via 6bone. I used 10BASE2 coax cable so I could run it along the building and nobody would mess with it, because it blended in perfectly with all the cable TV coax running on the outside of the building. Aside from replacing the hard drive once, it ran for several years before regular access points became affordable. What fun!
- fellowmartian 4y ago
  Man, I’m always jealous when I hear these tales of how things used to be here. I came to New York in early 2021 and my experience is completely different - it’s basically 24/7 grind and this kind of hacker fun seems inconceivable now. But maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places.
  - gregsadetsky 4y ago
    I feel like https://www.nycresistor.com/ https://www.nycresistor.com/ and https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/ still embody the spirit of those early communities!
    - dtaht 4y ago
      I love what these folk are doing. also the battlemesh crowd is fun. See guifi for a better model for spreading the internet around...
  - 4y ago
moremetadata 4y ago
Checks out but the format has changed. https://web.archive.org/web/19990429115208/http://www.rage.net/wireless/wireless_howto.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990429115208/http://www.rage.n... Previously documented and viewable page omissions is Wayback Machine's court order problem.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> The total cost of each end of the router, including antennas and cabling, is less than 1300 US dollars, which is a considerable cost savings over the dedicated bridge units (typically about 3100 US each) available from the same manufacturer. Adjusted for inflation, $1300 in 1998 dollars is equivalent to nearly $2400 in today's dollars. The $3100 manufacturer price would be equivalent to $5700 today. Really puts into perspective how accessible computing and hardware have become.
- dtaht 4y ago
  I appreciate the loan from greg´s banker (his mom) all the more now. Without that... well, I still expect we would have had wifi, but perhaps only a for-pay-by-the-minute version from boingo. We (greg and I) later fought hard to get free wifi into the coffeeshops around the santa cruz and los-gatos area, trading free admin for free coffee as part of a group called thirdbreak. I am sad that our mailing list from that era has been lost to the copyright clowns...
neurostimulant 4y ago
The linux router project referenced by the article is now redirecting to a porn site. Snapshot from 1998: https://web.archive.org/web/19981212030604/http://www.linuxrouter.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981212030604/http://www.linuxr...
- dtaht 4y ago
  If it wasn't for porn, we wouldn´t have the internet we have today. It paid for a lot of T3s
macropin 4y ago
I built something similar around the same time to share BigPond Cable. IIRC it was a 486 based machine with dual NICS, single HD floppy drive and FreeSCO^ Linux based router on floppy. It was very reliable, and lived under the stairs of my parents house until they moved. ^ https://freesco.sourceforge.net/ https://freesco.sourceforge.net/
the_third_wave 4y ago
The first wireless network here on the farm was based around a full tower containing an Abit BP-6 [1] with 2x366MHz Celerons (running at 400 MHz) into which I had placed a PCMCIA to ISA adapter containing an Engenius Senao 200mw PCMCIA Card w/MMCX Connectors [1] and two external antennas. That BP-6 - which used to be my development machine until I got something a bit more up to date - was fairly overloaded since it also hosted out mail, web services, surveillance cameras, file/print/etc services, media services and more. Still, it worked and covered quite a big area both due to the high-power wifi adapter as well as the fact that the antennas were placed on a high central place. I built it in 2003 and replaced it with a WRT54GL after a few years. The WRT54GL was killed by Thor and replaced with an Asus RT-N16 which also got killed by lightning, replaced with another RT-N16 which - you guessed it - got killed by lightning after which I replaced it with a host of cheapo 802.11g routers which also got blown up. Then I installed some large surge protectors (i.e. large and overly expensive MOVs [2]) after which these problems were solved. I now use a bunch of Xiaomi "routers" (flashed with OpenWRT) as access points, leaving the routing to a LXC container on the server-under-the-stairs. The BP-6 stands in the "museum" - that is stuffed away in the barn next to a number of other relics from the past. [1] https://www.keenansystems.com/store/engenius_senao_200mw_pcmcia_card_with_mmcx_connectors_2511-cd-plus-ext2.htm https://www.keenansystems.com/store/engenius_senao_200mw_pcm... [2] https://components101.com/articles/metal-oxide-varistor-mov-overview https://components101.com/articles/metal-oxide-varistor-mov-...
_0xdd 4y ago
For anyone interested in creating their own router running Linux or *BSD, check out the PC Engines APU2 series. Very inexpensive and uses coreboot.
chairborne 4y ago
lol.... the linux router project hyperlinks redirect to pornography
ram_rattle 4y ago
glad that something like openwrt exists, so many people understand the internals of wifi router using this awesome open source software
- dtaht 4y ago
  I wish more understood wifi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefresh=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefr... enough to help fix it.
gregatragenet3 4y ago
Wow. glad y'all enjoyed that little walk down memory lane. I am still around and still working in tech -- although nowadays work involves poking API's to launch servers and related infrastructure vs. the time that this article was written where someone in my line of work had to drive to the datacenter whenever a server needed an upgrade or became unresponsive. My roommate at the time is still around too, his work is in the realm of reducing internet latency in routers by doing clever things with their packet buffers. Some 5 or 10 years after the howto was written Cisco/Belkin reached out to us. Someone had patented putting a wireless card in a router, and they wanted our help with showing there was prior art. That process opened my eyes because to a couple guys like us it seemed like an obvious thing to do to put a wireless card in and network with it, like any other network card at the time it just had an antenna instead of a cat5 cable. Nothing 'inventive' about doing it, its just a logical step. I think they ended up settling so maybe that original patent-holder gets a couple cents on every wireless router, not sure. I remember the hostname that document was served from when it was written, a tower PC hostname 'screamingslave' (NiN reference), and it served that document from the Redwood Estates (remote) side of the wireless link. 'for work' my work is all cloud infra, I still run my own personal server -- something I built and configured to run openstack, to be a "cloud in a box" -- hostname 'mantaro' (a reference to the river that is the source of the amazon), and that document is served from a VM running within, hostname 'immora' (doom reference). It seems to be surviving the HN hug-of-death so far, but it was written in what was state-of-the-art for 1998, just a plain html doc, with maybe a css style sheet (did the original even have that?). Yeah no Nuxt/Vue SPA with some nosql backend. If you wanna see another of my efforts in 98, I was also involved in bringing 'directory services' to Linux, tldr something more modern (at the time) than NIS, using LDAP for managing your users and other directory objects. That doc can be found here http://www.rage.net/ldap/ldapns-howto/ http://www.rage.net/ldap/ldapns-howto/
- dtaht 4y ago
  Thx for the heads-up greg. Nice to see that old pre-blog entry again. I wrote a 3 and 10 year retrospective of the project here: http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-invented-embedded-linux-based.html http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-invented-embedded-l... I never found out if they settled the case or not... I was quite irked at everyone about a patent that seemed so obvious... Since then a lot of folk have come out to me about how we ALL were in just those few months, inventing the wifi future. We all invented it together, and you and I wrote enough of our bit down so everyone could invent more. For those here that don't know my work on bufferbloat, I have kept on fixing wifi, with the outputs of the make-wifi-fast project finally the default in the linux kernel, and fq_codel/sqm/cake also covering the world. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ wish it was taking less time for the news and implementations of that to spread than it has.
dtaht 4y ago
Wonderful to see you all reflecting on that history and sharing your own stories. Fun times! I have a lot of stories from the 80s, for example from the armory geekhouse, where the di-hydrogen-monoxide scare originated... Greg and I and Everett went on to many greater things. I should probably note it was his gf at the time that first caused me to learn how to solve some of the root causes of bufferbloat - she would run this game that ate our whole 1Mbit connection until wondershaper came along. I am doing an AMA here, in late march, if you have any questions about what happened to me... or wifi... since 1998. https://discuss.broadband.money/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht https://discuss.broadband.money/c/broadband-grant-events/dav...
deeesstoronto 4y ago
Definitely brings back memories. I used to build small networks including supplying 386 boxes that booted LRP from a floppy to share a dialup internet connection for small businesses or university student houses. A lot were 10b2 internal networks since they didn't need to spend extra on a hub. Later, I remember choosing a Cisco Aironet 350? PCMCIA 802.11b card over the ORiNOCO (probably on price as I think both had wide compatibility and good power output) to use both in my NEC mobilepro and with a few improvised long-range wifi links. I built cantennas and biquads to get remote access to free and fast university internet.... Also remember trying to get my hands on a Senao 200mW PCMCIA card to squeeze out more range.

totoglazer 4y ago

This is a wild Time Machine. ISA cards. 28.8 upload. Thanks for sharing.

giuliomagnifico 4y ago
…and the prices! He is “happy” because using those spare parts he can spend only 1300$ for a wireless router.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  It seemed reasonable at the time. I briefly used a DEC Multia with two Aironet LM4500 PCMCIA wireless cards as a point-to-point backhaul and access point. That was a lot of money for hardware but the cable company wanted tens of thousands of dollars to bring coax a very short distance to the site, and ADSL in those days was still something you could expect to deliver just 128kbps upstream under ideal conditions.
  - dtaht 4y ago
    We used to use old DEC alphas as firewalls figuring the arch was so obscure as to not worry about binary attacks.
throwanem 4y ago
And the single-disk router distro! In the Coyote Linux derivative I ran that for years, back in the early noughties, on the one of several beat-up parts machines I then had which could run two 3C509 cards at once - who knows how I laid hands on those, but once I got it working it was a reliable enough setup for the whole more-or-less group house whose slant-ceilinged back attic room I lived in. Unlike in the article, we were within DSL range of the nearest CO and had no load coils to worry about, so any POTS extension would do - hence being able to have the whole house's network ops up in my little garret. I had a couple of desks and tables in there plus my little twin mattress and an Ikea Poang chair - and, thanks to a long run of Cat-5 I'd somehow managed to scrounge, not only 802.11b coverage for the whole house with one of the early-model WRT-54Gs, but even rudimentary internet TV for the living room with another hacked-together beige box and an All-in-Wonder card bought used with an employee discount from the cheesy little computer store I'd spent a few months working at. We even had four-player Gauntlet with MAME and a few cheap USB 1.0 controllers. Thin times by the standards of the life I live these days, but good times, too.
- znpy 4y ago
  Floppydistros! The memories! Booting linux on an internet café from a floppydistro because I didn’t really know what linux was and my parents wouldn’t let me try stuff on the “home computer”. What was it, coyote linux? Can’t really remember now :)
  - throwanem 4y ago
    Coyote, yeah! Same one I ran, and maybe the first time I ever actually put Linux to a useful purpose beyond satisfying my own intellectual curiosity - my first first time being a few years earlier with a Slackware floppy install on a Toshiba Tecra laptop. I had to scrape together enough disks for the A set, download and image them from the Windows 95 install, and then print out enough docs to figure out how to get dialup working again once I was done repaving the machine with a then totally unfamiliar environment - I'd bought the laptop used with summer-job money and it hadn't come with OS install media, so I either got it working or I was just SOL, with no access any longer from Tennessee to the mostly West Coast-based social circle that Internet access had made available to me, and no obvious way to recover the machine to a working state. Luckily, it didn't come to that! Good times. :D
- dtaht 4y ago
  Ironically we never did get the VERY EXPENSIVE 20MB IDE flash drive to work, to replace the floppy disk. I still have it.
aecay 4y ago
And the fact that determining the true lat/long of one's location was best done by using mapquest.com (ah memories...). Unscrambled GPS for civilians didn't come along for another couple years.
- dtaht 4y ago
  Greg had had an early idea about traffic alerts, which actually worked pretty well, but it did not monetize. I dont know when he gave up on it...

cowmix 4y ago

At the time, using KA9Q on top of DOS was also a great way to accomplish the same outcome.

dtaht 4y ago
Not a lot of people know that linux´s original network stack more or less came from phil karn giving permission to copy KA9Q.

uniformlyrandom 4y ago

What if I'd like to build a linux router out of modern hardware? I would like to stop upgrading routers every two years (maybe just upgrade the wifi cards in it), and have full control over router's UI (command line is fine). Is this a stupid idea?

giuliomagnifico 4y ago
Not a stupid idea, lots of people apre are doing it with custom machine using OpenWrt.
throwanem 4y ago
Not at all, although PFSense is based on BSD rather than Linux. It's incredibly full-featured (with even a complete and polished web UI) and pretty easy to configure and operate, and definitely where I'd suggest starting.
- irfwashere 4y ago
  Yes there's a lot of good content now with guidance on setting up one of these pf or opnsense routers. Really cool stuff. And use any old router you have in AP mode and you're set!
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  OpenWRT [0] OTOH is actually Linux. Also very full featured, including a GUI (LuCI) that even though some times lags a little behind the command-line and config file stuff, is still pretty good. As another FreeBSD-based alternative, there's the PFSense fork OPNSense [1], which started out as a fork of PfSense after the Netgate takeover and complaints about their openness and support for the community. [0] https://openwrt.org/ https://openwrt.org/ [1] https://opnsense.com/ https://opnsense.com/
  - throwanem 4y ago
    Oh, I didn't know about the fork - I guess that shows how long it's been since I last ran PFSense. Good to know, thanks!

throwaway892238 4y ago

I used to build Linux router software that would fit on a floppy disk and run it in a 486DX2, for absolutely no reason except it was fun as hell. Made a nice web UI, packed in a ton of advanced features. Wanted to try and start a company to sell little open source routers, but then I found out cheap routers were quite hard to make money on, so I became a sysadmin instead and mostly browsed Slashdot for 10 years. My big regret is not becoming a musician or woodworker instead.

hk1337 4y ago
> Linux router software that would fit on a floppy disk and run it in a 486DX2 I thought this was me that posted this and forgot I posted it. I did this exact thing with same equipment back in college. My reasoning was slightly different. I did do it just for fun but also I wanted to run multiple computers and servers and the university was pretty strict on the one computer per connection rule.
- ghaff 4y ago
  In the early days of consumer broadband, routers/switches were these exotic things and the cable companies absolutely would not support the configuration.
  - dtaht 4y ago
    the cable companies had no service worth a damn at the time. DSL was going to win... it really was... and the fiber folk were planning to deliver any day now...
- dualboot 4y ago
  There are a lot of us out there.
pengaru 4y ago
Did something similar-ish, except using an old 386 motherboard packed to the gills with 30-pin SIMMs. Booted off 3.5" floppy into initramfs. Init was a busybox shell script (@/linuxrc IIRC) to setup ip masquerading as it was known then, then it'd deliberately panic by exiting init while the kernel kept running the network stack with no userspace. That little pile of PC debris eventually became a dialup POP for a local girl I met on IRC who was at constant war with her older brother over their shared AOL account, despite having their own computers w/phone lines. Fun times, those teen-aged years. Linux was such a game changer back then, enabling kids to deploy their own ISP if they just read the HOWTOs and collected enough computer trash.

lamontcg 4y ago

I think around 2002 I had a FreeBSD box running as a firewall/wireless router with an ath0 card (long since forgotten what that was) using a very old motherboard (might have been from a prior job in 1999 or so). Also had a Sparc 5 hanging off it which I used as a ircd and httpd server since that was just less likely to get hacked into running servers (and no cloudy anything I could buy back then).

shmerl 4y ago

Why is situation with wireless routers still so messed up? Barely anything new coming out has proper upstream Linux drivers. Broadcom chipsets are one of the worst offenders, but others are barely any better. Why can't Intel make some?

amannm 4y ago
device or chip manufacturers won't spend the money to develop/support/maintain in-kernel linux drivers if they don't think it will ultimately net them enough of an ROI based on sales of the corresponding device or chip. the market for non-carrier branded, end user hackable, linux based home routers is pretty small and probably shrinking as a percent of the overall market for wifi chipped devices.
- amannm 4y ago
  informative post: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/general-hardware/1324300-linux-kernel-patches-posted-for-usb-support-with-realtek-rtw88-wifi-driver?p=1324344#post1324344 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/general-hardw...
dtaht 4y ago
I have tried to fix the chipsets most used in openwrt. Presently the ath9k is best supported, the mt76 is pretty good, the mt79 coming along, and the ath10k, ok. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefresh=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefr... Broadcom can roast in hell.

johnklos 4y ago

Reminds me of creating a wireless access point using an old 80486 laptop and a ORiNOCO Bronze wireless card, a pigtail and an antenna. It was for one of the first free public wireless networks in Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, New York, in 2001. The bandwidth was provided by alt.coffee, a coffee and Internet cafe. It took some convincing to get the owners of alt.coffee to let me do this because they thought it would be bad for business. I had to convince them that people who could afford laptops with wireless weren't renting their computers, but they'd likely buy coffee. It worked :) The laptop ran NetBSD and was installed in the awning of Accidental CDs a few doors down from alt.coffee because they were open 24/7, so someone was always at the front of the store. It routed its own private subnet that the NetBSD router in alt.coffee NAT'd and provided public IPv6 via 6bone. I used 10BASE2 coax cable so I could run it along the building and nobody would mess with it, because it blended in perfectly with all the cable TV coax running on the outside of the building. Aside from replacing the hard drive once, it ran for several years before regular access points became affordable. What fun!

fellowmartian 4y ago
Man, I’m always jealous when I hear these tales of how things used to be here. I came to New York in early 2021 and my experience is completely different - it’s basically 24/7 grind and this kind of hacker fun seems inconceivable now. But maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places.
- gregsadetsky 4y ago
  I feel like https://www.nycresistor.com/ https://www.nycresistor.com/ and https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/ still embody the spirit of those early communities!
  - dtaht 4y ago
    I love what these folk are doing. also the battlemesh crowd is fun. See guifi for a better model for spreading the internet around...
- 4y ago

moremetadata 4y ago

Checks out but the format has changed. https://web.archive.org/web/19990429115208/http://www.rage.net/wireless/wireless_howto.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990429115208/http://www.rage.n... Previously documented and viewable page omissions is Wayback Machine's court order problem.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> The total cost of each end of the router, including antennas and cabling, is less than 1300 US dollars, which is a considerable cost savings over the dedicated bridge units (typically about 3100 US each) available from the same manufacturer. Adjusted for inflation, $1300 in 1998 dollars is equivalent to nearly $2400 in today's dollars. The $3100 manufacturer price would be equivalent to $5700 today. Really puts into perspective how accessible computing and hardware have become.

dtaht 4y ago
I appreciate the loan from greg´s banker (his mom) all the more now. Without that... well, I still expect we would have had wifi, but perhaps only a for-pay-by-the-minute version from boingo. We (greg and I) later fought hard to get free wifi into the coffeeshops around the santa cruz and los-gatos area, trading free admin for free coffee as part of a group called thirdbreak. I am sad that our mailing list from that era has been lost to the copyright clowns...

neurostimulant 4y ago

The linux router project referenced by the article is now redirecting to a porn site. Snapshot from 1998: https://web.archive.org/web/19981212030604/http://www.linuxrouter.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/19981212030604/http://www.linuxr...

dtaht 4y ago
If it wasn't for porn, we wouldn´t have the internet we have today. It paid for a lot of T3s

macropin 4y ago

I built something similar around the same time to share BigPond Cable. IIRC it was a 486 based machine with dual NICS, single HD floppy drive and FreeSCO^ Linux based router on floppy. It was very reliable, and lived under the stairs of my parents house until they moved. ^ https://freesco.sourceforge.net/ https://freesco.sourceforge.net/

the_third_wave 4y ago

The first wireless network here on the farm was based around a full tower containing an Abit BP-6 [1] with 2x366MHz Celerons (running at 400 MHz) into which I had placed a PCMCIA to ISA adapter containing an Engenius Senao 200mw PCMCIA Card w/MMCX Connectors [1] and two external antennas. That BP-6 - which used to be my development machine until I got something a bit more up to date - was fairly overloaded since it also hosted out mail, web services, surveillance cameras, file/print/etc services, media services and more. Still, it worked and covered quite a big area both due to the high-power wifi adapter as well as the fact that the antennas were placed on a high central place. I built it in 2003 and replaced it with a WRT54GL after a few years. The WRT54GL was killed by Thor and replaced with an Asus RT-N16 which also got killed by lightning, replaced with another RT-N16 which - you guessed it - got killed by lightning after which I replaced it with a host of cheapo 802.11g routers which also got blown up. Then I installed some large surge protectors (i.e. large and overly expensive MOVs [2]) after which these problems were solved. I now use a bunch of Xiaomi "routers" (flashed with OpenWRT) as access points, leaving the routing to a LXC container on the server-under-the-stairs. The BP-6 stands in the "museum" - that is stuffed away in the barn next to a number of other relics from the past. [1] https://www.keenansystems.com/store/engenius_senao_200mw_pcmcia_card_with_mmcx_connectors_2511-cd-plus-ext2.htm https://www.keenansystems.com/store/engenius_senao_200mw_pcm... [2] https://components101.com/articles/metal-oxide-varistor-mov-overview https://components101.com/articles/metal-oxide-varistor-mov-...

_0xdd 4y ago

For anyone interested in creating their own router running Linux or *BSD, check out the PC Engines APU2 series. Very inexpensive and uses coreboot.

chairborne 4y ago

lol.... the linux router project hyperlinks redirect to pornography

ram_rattle 4y ago

glad that something like openwrt exists, so many people understand the internals of wifi router using this awesome open source software

dtaht 4y ago
I wish more understood wifi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefresh=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefr... enough to help fix it.

gregatragenet3 4y ago

Wow. glad y'all enjoyed that little walk down memory lane. I am still around and still working in tech -- although nowadays work involves poking API's to launch servers and related infrastructure vs. the time that this article was written where someone in my line of work had to drive to the datacenter whenever a server needed an upgrade or became unresponsive. My roommate at the time is still around too, his work is in the realm of reducing internet latency in routers by doing clever things with their packet buffers. Some 5 or 10 years after the howto was written Cisco/Belkin reached out to us. Someone had patented putting a wireless card in a router, and they wanted our help with showing there was prior art. That process opened my eyes because to a couple guys like us it seemed like an obvious thing to do to put a wireless card in and network with it, like any other network card at the time it just had an antenna instead of a cat5 cable. Nothing 'inventive' about doing it, its just a logical step. I think they ended up settling so maybe that original patent-holder gets a couple cents on every wireless router, not sure. I remember the hostname that document was served from when it was written, a tower PC hostname 'screamingslave' (NiN reference), and it served that document from the Redwood Estates (remote) side of the wireless link. 'for work' my work is all cloud infra, I still run my own personal server -- something I built and configured to run openstack, to be a "cloud in a box" -- hostname 'mantaro' (a reference to the river that is the source of the amazon), and that document is served from a VM running within, hostname 'immora' (doom reference). It seems to be surviving the HN hug-of-death so far, but it was written in what was state-of-the-art for 1998, just a plain html doc, with maybe a css style sheet (did the original even have that?). Yeah no Nuxt/Vue SPA with some nosql backend. If you wanna see another of my efforts in 98, I was also involved in bringing 'directory services' to Linux, tldr something more modern (at the time) than NIS, using LDAP for managing your users and other directory objects. That doc can be found here http://www.rage.net/ldap/ldapns-howto/ http://www.rage.net/ldap/ldapns-howto/

dtaht 4y ago
Thx for the heads-up greg. Nice to see that old pre-blog entry again. I wrote a 3 and 10 year retrospective of the project here: http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-invented-embedded-linux-based.html http://the-edge.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-invented-embedded-l... I never found out if they settled the case or not... I was quite irked at everyone about a patent that seemed so obvious... Since then a lot of folk have come out to me about how we ALL were in just those few months, inventing the wifi future. We all invented it together, and you and I wrote enough of our bit down so everyone could invent more. For those here that don't know my work on bufferbloat, I have kept on fixing wifi, with the outputs of the make-wifi-fast project finally the default in the linux kernel, and fq_codel/sqm/cake also covering the world. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/ wish it was taking less time for the news and implementations of that to spread than it has.

dtaht 4y ago

Wonderful to see you all reflecting on that history and sharing your own stories. Fun times! I have a lot of stories from the 80s, for example from the armory geekhouse, where the di-hydrogen-monoxide scare originated... Greg and I and Everett went on to many greater things. I should probably note it was his gf at the time that first caused me to learn how to solve some of the root causes of bufferbloat - she would run this game that ate our whole 1Mbit connection until wondershaper came along. I am doing an AMA here, in late march, if you have any questions about what happened to me... or wifi... since 1998. https://discuss.broadband.money/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht https://discuss.broadband.money/c/broadband-grant-events/dav...

deeesstoronto 4y ago

Definitely brings back memories. I used to build small networks including supplying 386 boxes that booted LRP from a floppy to share a dialup internet connection for small businesses or university student houses. A lot were 10b2 internal networks since they didn't need to spend extra on a hub. Later, I remember choosing a Cisco Aironet 350? PCMCIA 802.11b card over the ORiNOCO (probably on price as I think both had wide compatibility and good power output) to use both in my NEC mobilepro and with a few improvised long-range wifi links. I built cantennas and biquads to get remote access to free and fast university internet.... Also remember trying to get my hands on a Senao 200mW PCMCIA card to squeeze out more range.