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

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

#91

Post by dtaht »

fork-while-fork wrote: post #54
uniformlyrandom wrote: post #8

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?

I've been running a PC Engines APU2 ( https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm ) for many years now. It has enough power to route over my gigabit fiber connection. It has mini-PCIE slots for wifi cards. If you want 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, you'll need two cards and run two instances of hostapd. The software stack is pretty basic: - IPtables for routing and firewall - DNSMasq for DNS cache and DHCP - Hostapd for wireless

running SQM?

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

#92

Post by dtaht »

raggi wrote: post #49
uniformlyrandom wrote: post #8

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?

This is a border router, not a wireless router, but this was my build https://res.rag.pub/2020-11-1-an-home-router.html I've been running this configuration for 3 years. There's no fancy UI, but there's also no awful vendor code involved. I don't think about my router anymore, and internet issues no longer occur inside my house, at all. It achieves line rate in both directions while also consistently maintaining less…

+10! Cake?

I have been working on making cake work for ISPs of late: https://libreqos.io/

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

#93

Post by dtaht »

lukeh wrote: post #80
gregatragenet3 wrote: post #65

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…

Ah, wow, a blast from the past! I wrote RFC2307 and {nss,pam}_ldap (which, to be fair, weren't the most robust bits of code, but I was a pretty green C programmer back then).

Thank you for that. It helped.

that said, whoever thought ldap was a sane way to organize information... oh, I dont want to get into it...

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

#94

Post by dtaht »

throwanem wrote: post #4
totoglazer wrote: post #2

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

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…

Ironically we never did get the VERY EXPENSIVE 20MB IDE flash drive to work, to replace the floppy disk. I still have it.

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

#95

Post by dtaht »

aecay wrote: post #27
totoglazer wrote: post #2

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

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.

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...

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

#96

Post by dtaht »

rektide wrote: post #28
uniformlyrandom wrote: post #8

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?

It's a great idea. It's a bit of a pain the ass from a hardware sense. OpenWRT is available & easy but there's quite limited hardware (newely no wifi6), but honestly, at this point, I'd much rather use a real computer and some add-in cards. Alas availability of hardware- specifically AP grade cards & things to plug them into is forsakenly awful. One has to scrounge around for increasingly absurdly priced botique adap…

I too wish that we could easily use everything as an AP. My vision back then was that we would go meshy for everything. For many years I had full adhoc support (babel and batman protocols) and could go from device to device, from ethernet to wifi and back again, without losing a nailed up connection. I couldn't figure out why APs were so popular... the wifi protocol scaled then to 13 miles, now it barely goes behind the couch.

USB is a terrible idea for latency. CARDBUS was so much better. I hate usb audio interfaces with a passion, also.

OpenWrt has a place in that itty bitty boxes needed custom compilers and close attention paid to very small amounts of d and i-cache, which those running ubuntu + systemd have kind of missed, as well as tight integration with all the core tools like dns and dhcp and a zillion ip protocol encapsulations desktop OSes lack.

I see a lot of ubuntu and debian entering the embedded space now that cpus have got cache and memory to burn, and I do hope that one day we see more wifi pci cards that can actually function as APs, and antennas that work.

Presently that is hard to do - the iwl wifi6 cards kind of suck, and it is hard to find mt79 chips, and the ath10k was a huge step backwards from the ath9k in many respects.

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

#97

Post by dtaht »

rektide wrote: post #64
simoncion wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Openwrt works fine but it's all so special. Special software running on special hardware. Doesn't OpenWRT work on x86 hardware just fine? https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=22.03.3&targe... > (You can select 32-bit x86 or two other flavors if you don't want to run on x86/64.)

OpenWRT is itself ultra special. It has a very narrow mission statement. If you learn openwrt, and then want to runa desktop, you'll have to learn a new thing. The special purpose nature of openwrt makes it surpemely disinteresting to me. Actually setting up a home network with masquerading, dhcp, some dns is shockingly easy with systemd. Add hostapd and some extras, maybe miniupnpd, traffic shappers, optionally some…

I still use it on x86 a lot. The apu series runs forever on 5 watts. The openwrt gui is better than systemd. It is easy to setup vlans and tunnels on openwrt. That said, I do wish strongly that the wifi market would have a decent card for your laptop that would let it do ap mode well.

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

#98

Post by dtaht »

mindslight wrote: post #22
uniformlyrandom wrote: post #8

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?

I switched to generic amd64 machines for my main router and 2 access points and haven't looked back. Each machine has a Mikrotik R11e-2HnD for 2.4GHz (AR958x), and a Compex card (WLE900VX?) for 5Ghz (QCA986x/988x, surplus). I think the 2.4GHz cards are fine with libre software out of the box, but the 5GHz cards want a firmware blob (which I consider the same freedom/security concerns as if the blob were loaded from f…

I hope you use sqm-scripts also. It works on any linux.

I have worked hard to make the ath10k work well on everything.

mt76 is pretty good now, the mt79, coming along. The wifi stack we developed for openwrt is now the default in linux for all these cards. https://www.cs.kau.se/tohojo/airtime-fairness/

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

#99

Post by simoncion »

rektide wrote: post #64
simoncion wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Openwrt works fine but it's all so special. Special software running on special hardware. Doesn't OpenWRT work on x86 hardware just fine? https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=22.03.3&targe... > (You can select 32-bit x86 or two other flavors if you don't want to run on x86/64.)

OpenWRT is itself ultra special. It has a very narrow mission statement. If you learn openwrt, and then want to runa desktop, you'll have to learn a new thing. The special purpose nature of openwrt makes it surpemely disinteresting to me. Actually setting up a home network with masquerading, dhcp, some dns is shockingly easy with systemd. Add hostapd and some extras, maybe miniupnpd, traffic shappers, optionally some…

> I'd love do know how many people use x86 openwrt...

I mean, if I didn't _explicitly_ want to use Gentoo Linux on my x86-64 router, I'd be using OpenWRT. OpenWRT is far more than sufficient for the typical home network, and generally quite good enough for a power-user's home network.

Regardless, I brought up OpenWRT on x86 to mention that OpenWRT runs and runs _just fine_ on non-special hardware.

> But it's an evolutionary dead end, will ne what it is forever, and it's a bit special. It has a bunch of NIH'ed smaller sized alternative tools that no one else in the linux multiverse uses.

This... isn't a problem? Like, not even a little bit.

OpenWRT, Vyatta, Juniper's Junos OS, Cisco's iOS, Mikrotik's RouterOS, Ubiquiti's Vyatta fork all use different tooling and have different UIs. Of the set, I prefer Junos (for its transactional configuration application and automated rollback), Mikrotik (for its weird little interactive shell), and OpenWRT (because it's more or less an ordinary Linux with largely-Linux-standard software, and the bulk of the rest of it is shell scripts that you can pretty easily understand and modify if needed).

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

7speter wrote: post #50
fellowmartian wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it’s basically 24/7 grind and Rent is too damn high for anything else

[deleted]
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