5 ms·

Sigh.... I should probably replace my commercial-grade WiFi router with some custom box that can run OpenBSD or something. When I first got it, I tried to go

by ansible 11y ago

Sigh.... I should probably replace my commercial-grade WiFi router with some custom box that can run OpenBSD or something. When I first got it, I tried to go through and lock down everything I could find. But I suspect that may not be enough.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
I wonder how much it would cost to build a reasonable wifi router out of a raspberry pi, or something similar. If you could keep performance and consumer costs comparable, you could probably sell quite a few.
- jAcKyL_8643 11y ago
  Mikrotik does this. Though their OS is not open source.
- DEinspanjer 11y ago
  It isn't hard to put together low power hardware with two or more NICs, and you can then toss something like pfSense or similar on it. The biggest challenge is whether this will impact your internet speed. If you have a faster broadband connection, you can quickly exhaust the throughput capabilities of such a limited platform. Things get significantly worse if you are relying on the router for your LAN traffic as well (i.e. you don't have a switch to offload the LAN only traffic). With the more commercial solutions, whether for SOHO or SMB, the biggest advantage they bring to the table is the ability to utilize hardware optimizations such as offloading for checksum, TCP segmentation, and large receive. pfSense actually has code to perform the offloading, but you have to ensure the hardware you're using is capable of performing the work.
- redwards510 11y ago
  For $200 you can get something like this [1]. Low power Atom CPU, RAM, and two NICs included so you can throw pFSense + Snort on it easily. You can add a USB wifi dongle and make it an AP. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008KB5YCK/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=1ZHB1F2YYE7F7&coliid=I32ZBRXDGGU0GF http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008KB5YCK/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl...
timtadh 11y ago
I had a great experience putting something together using an ALIX 6f2 (http://www.pcengines.ch/alix6f2.htm http://www.pcengines.ch/alix6f2.htm) which I bought via a Netgate kit with enclosure (http://store.netgate.com/Network-Computers-C2.aspx http://store.netgate.com/Network-Computers-C2.aspx). Netgate isn't selling that one but is selling other boards which you can put together something similar. The APU line looks really interesting. The cool thing about the ALIX and APU boards is they often support buying things like 3g modem cards which you can use to multi-home your connections with pfSense. You could also create an SMS gateway or similar service.
cmavr8 11y ago
Why not run DD-WRT? It is frequently buggy (performance wise) but should be fixable.
tracker1 11y ago
I really liked my older RouterStation Pro box... I even have a backup one new in the box... though I didn't add any wifi to the router itself.
snaky 11y ago
The first thing I consider choosing router is OpenWRT availability for the model

by ansible 11y ago

pavel_lishin 11y ago

I wonder how much it would cost to build a reasonable wifi router out of a raspberry pi, or something similar. If you could keep performance and consumer costs comparable, you could probably sell quite a few.

jAcKyL_8643 11y ago
Mikrotik does this. Though their OS is not open source.
DEinspanjer 11y ago
It isn't hard to put together low power hardware with two or more NICs, and you can then toss something like pfSense or similar on it. The biggest challenge is whether this will impact your internet speed. If you have a faster broadband connection, you can quickly exhaust the throughput capabilities of such a limited platform. Things get significantly worse if you are relying on the router for your LAN traffic as well (i.e. you don't have a switch to offload the LAN only traffic). With the more commercial solutions, whether for SOHO or SMB, the biggest advantage they bring to the table is the ability to utilize hardware optimizations such as offloading for checksum, TCP segmentation, and large receive. pfSense actually has code to perform the offloading, but you have to ensure the hardware you're using is capable of performing the work.
redwards510 11y ago
For $200 you can get something like this [1]. Low power Atom CPU, RAM, and two NICs included so you can throw pFSense + Snort on it easily. You can add a USB wifi dongle and make it an AP. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008KB5YCK/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=1ZHB1F2YYE7F7&coliid=I32ZBRXDGGU0GF http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008KB5YCK/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl...

timtadh 11y ago

I had a great experience putting something together using an ALIX 6f2 (http://www.pcengines.ch/alix6f2.htm http://www.pcengines.ch/alix6f2.htm) which I bought via a Netgate kit with enclosure (http://store.netgate.com/Network-Computers-C2.aspx http://store.netgate.com/Network-Computers-C2.aspx). Netgate isn't selling that one but is selling other boards which you can put together something similar. The APU line looks really interesting. The cool thing about the ALIX and APU boards is they often support buying things like 3g modem cards which you can use to multi-home your connections with pfSense. You could also create an SMS gateway or similar service.

cmavr8 11y ago

Why not run DD-WRT? It is frequently buggy (performance wise) but should be fixable.

tracker1 11y ago

I really liked my older RouterStation Pro box... I even have a backup one new in the box... though I didn't add any wifi to the router itself.

snaky 11y ago

The first thing I consider choosing router is OpenWRT availability for the model