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

Ath10k does seem to work well out of the box with no fussing. Thank you for making it work so well I can take it for granted! Otherwise I wouldn't really want to be in the business of tinkering with my own access points - one of the main goals of my setup is to get away from tinkering.

I haven't found a need for traffic shaping, with a symmetric Gbit fibre uplink. And if I had wireless contention, the first thing I would do is put a third card in each machine to use an additional channel.

Do you have any pointers to pcie (m.2/mini) cards that use chips supported by m76/m79?

The main thing I'm missing is clients being steered to the best AP. From what I understand this feature is really only found on enterprise gear (with patched hostapd and the like) and isn't readily available in the libre world.

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.

It's not a stupid ideea, just not very practical:

1) Modern routers actually use modern hardware. Nobody builds routers today with 2010's network interfaces or CPUs.

2) Modern hardware is only modern now. You can replace the wifi once or twice, but at some point new adapters won't fit the old slot on the MB. Then you need to change everything: CPU, memory, etc.

3) It will cost a lot more initially, then only a little less than a router when you replace the wifi card and then a lot more when you have to upgrade everythig (see #2).

4) Wifi cards have big issues with linux kernel/drivers. Many have no linux support at all, many are proprietary binary blob driver only, so you can't upgrade the kernel version, many are unmaintained and don't support new protocols such as WPA3, and many only support client mode, so you can't create access points with them.

5) Routers usually have proprietary acceleration for NAT and other network operations. Until ~recently, linux had no acceleration at all and even today, most routers are a lot faster with their official firmware than with OpenWrt or DD-WRT. With any open source linux you only get more flexibility, not speed.

6) It will eat your time permanently. There will always be updates to be done, incompatibilities to debug, bugs to fix, stuff to adjust, performance graphics to waste time looking at, logs to monitor... If this is what you want, go for it. Creating a linux router is very educational, but be warned that anything linux-related is VERY time consuming.

7) If you want to use anything else other than a SBC, or use a separate ethernet switch, it will consume more power than a router. Then you need a bigger UPS, which consumes even more power. Power costs over 2 years might be more the price of the router you replaced.