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I just finished setting up my raspberry pi as a personal router / firewall, to redirect my internet traffic over a VPN to a server i set up in europe. I'm build

I just finished setting up my raspberry pi as a personal router / firewall, to redirect my internet traffic over a VPN to a server i set up in europe. I'm building a chrome extension, and matching node.js app to allow to me toggle the routing on the raspberry pi from within my browser. I got sick of fighting my isp's throttling rules, which kicked in at the most frustrating and inopportune times, like halfway through downloading linux ISO's to play with on my raspberry pi.

plonk420 13y ago
i hear Pi isn't very good for routers/firewalls as it's a USB NIC. i was hoping to pfSense it up, too!
- AdrianRossouw 13y ago
  it really depends on how much you want to be pushing through it. considering my ADSL only syncs at 6MB, and not 200MB or whatever, it's fine for my purposes. Most of my machines are also still connected with 802.11g, so locally is not really a big problem either. I would think twice about using it as a straight fileserver though, because the ethernet and usb ports share bandwidth.
  - vardump 13y ago
    I use it successfully for a subset of my networking needs (VPN server, VPN client, secondary wifi network, failover 3G/4G routing, security cameras, etc.). Of course the throughput is just 15 Mbps (VPN) to 50 Mbps (routing), but that's enough for these tasks. Of course I can't route my primary internet connection (about 330-340 Mbps typical throughput) over it, but Asus RT-N56U does that just fine. Fileserver is not an issue, because there's about 300 Mbps total USB bandwidth and the NIC is just 100 Mbps. IRQs are a bit of an issue, full 100 Mbit bandwidth generates 2k IRQ/s, USB disk will probably take it to 8k IRQ/s, consuming a significant portion of CPU (maybe about 20%?). But if 10 MBps (80-90 Mbps throughput) fileserver performance is enough, RPi is just fine. About 3.5 MBps over ssh, like when using for example sshfs. For comparison, 3.5 MBps more than enough to saturate "54 Mbps" 11g for example, which can do 24 Mbps under ideal conditions (~3 MBps).
beagle3 13y ago
But you're still throttled when you try to bring the data home...
- laumars 13y ago
  I read that as his ISP uses traffic shaping - so bittorrent connections are uniformly throttled (when when the content is completely legal) yet VPN is not. So he tunnels his torrents through VPN. I have the same annoying problems - particularly as I like to offer up my bandwidth for Linux ISOs and creative commons works (I don't always contribute money to these projects (wife+kids usually see my wages before I do) so it's nice to contribute something even if the net effect is minute). Yet HTTP/HTTPS is completely unthrottled.
aksx 13y ago
You can a blog post about making it ? I am interested in making something similar.
kybernetyk 13y ago
> I just finished setting up my raspberry pi as a personal router / firewall, to redirect my internet traffic over a VPN to a server i set up in europe That's very interesting and something I'm inclined to do, too. Do you have any resources about that?

plonk420 13y ago

i hear Pi isn't very good for routers/firewalls as it's a USB NIC. i was hoping to pfSense it up, too!

AdrianRossouw 13y ago
it really depends on how much you want to be pushing through it. considering my ADSL only syncs at 6MB, and not 200MB or whatever, it's fine for my purposes. Most of my machines are also still connected with 802.11g, so locally is not really a big problem either. I would think twice about using it as a straight fileserver though, because the ethernet and usb ports share bandwidth.
- vardump 13y ago
  I use it successfully for a subset of my networking needs (VPN server, VPN client, secondary wifi network, failover 3G/4G routing, security cameras, etc.). Of course the throughput is just 15 Mbps (VPN) to 50 Mbps (routing), but that's enough for these tasks. Of course I can't route my primary internet connection (about 330-340 Mbps typical throughput) over it, but Asus RT-N56U does that just fine. Fileserver is not an issue, because there's about 300 Mbps total USB bandwidth and the NIC is just 100 Mbps. IRQs are a bit of an issue, full 100 Mbit bandwidth generates 2k IRQ/s, USB disk will probably take it to 8k IRQ/s, consuming a significant portion of CPU (maybe about 20%?). But if 10 MBps (80-90 Mbps throughput) fileserver performance is enough, RPi is just fine. About 3.5 MBps over ssh, like when using for example sshfs. For comparison, 3.5 MBps more than enough to saturate "54 Mbps" 11g for example, which can do 24 Mbps under ideal conditions (~3 MBps).

beagle3 13y ago

But you're still throttled when you try to bring the data home...

laumars 13y ago
I read that as his ISP uses traffic shaping - so bittorrent connections are uniformly throttled (when when the content is completely legal) yet VPN is not. So he tunnels his torrents through VPN. I have the same annoying problems - particularly as I like to offer up my bandwidth for Linux ISOs and creative commons works (I don't always contribute money to these projects (wife+kids usually see my wages before I do) so it's nice to contribute something even if the net effect is minute). Yet HTTP/HTTPS is completely unthrottled.

aksx 13y ago

You can a blog post about making it ? I am interested in making something similar.

kybernetyk 13y ago

> I just finished setting up my raspberry pi as a personal router / firewall, to redirect my internet traffic over a VPN to a server i set up in europe That's very interesting and something I'm inclined to do, too. Do you have any resources about that?