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How to turn anything into a router

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Re: How to turn anything into a router

#41

Post by colinb »

louwrentius wrote: post #19
ata_aman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn’t all traffic be routed through the OS/processor on board?

A CPU from the last 20 years can route traffic at gigabit speed. It's only something to worry about for a Raspberry Pi3 or something similarly 'crippled'.

I think I understand why this is true for plain IP forwarding. There isn’t much to break the cache and the lookups are few and fast.

What’s the cheapest (new) computer that can drive a 1Gb port with NAT? With a busy encrypted (wireguard?) connection?

[I don’t think qos has a lot of use in the domestic environment; sure, someone here does it but I think it’s much less mainstream than the features I already mentioned. ]

Such a device could drive my home. But in a couple of years I suspect I’ll want 2Gb or 10.

In the past I’ve tended to use a device until its crappy power supply failed. So I guess I’m hoping for a >5 year life span/upgrade capacity.

For all I know the answer to my question is one of those passively cooled four port n100 bricks from AliExpress. Anecdata happily accepted.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#42

Post by stavros »

LatticeAnimal wrote: post #14

I’ve been using OpnSense/pfsense [0] for years and would highly recommend it. It has a great automatic update experience, config backups, builtin wireguard tunnels and advanced features like packet filtering options via suricata. When I am doing network management on my weekends, I’m so glad I’m not stuck in the Linux terminal learning about networking internals and can instead just go to a webui and configure my rou…

I'm at a stage where I don't want to be doing network management on my weekends. I have a Ubiquiti router that's pretty good, and for my router I'd like something like TrueNAS for my NAS, a distribution that completely turns the hardware into an appliance I can configure once and forget about.

Is there something like that?

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#43

Post by proxysna »

Pleasant thing about routers that is is so simple to build one after learning basics of networking and pretty much any OS or distro can act as one. There are obvious choices like OPN\PFSENSE, OpenWRT, DD-WRT, FreshTomato, but literally any PC with a single Ethernet port can act as one. My favorite setup was a laptop running Ubuntu and the whole router setup was in a single netplan file + dnsmasq for DHCP.

Edit: And ofc best cheap device imo is OrangePI R1 LTS and a whatever usb wifi dongle. Came in clutch a few times, such a nice little device.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#44

Post by lstodd »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #39
jasonjayr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on principal, but I often find that the GUI abstractions don't always map to the linux tooling/terminology/concepts, which often ends with a head bashing against the wall thinking "this is linux, I know it can do it, and I can do it by hand, but what is this GUI trying to conceptualize?!?!" I was recently introduced to a Barracuda router, and bashed my head against the wall long enough to discover it had an s…

> I've used pfsense, OpenWRT, Barracuda, Verizon's OEM router (Actiontec) and they all represent the same functionality wildly differently. Worth noting that pfSense (and OPNsense) are not Linux-based, they're based on BSD, specifically FreeBSD. While it's possible to have standard router OS web UIs that are cross platform, the underlying technology is different, so it's not really a surprise that there will be diffe…

Not much different. FreeBSD's pf is a port of OpenBSD's pf, and nftables are heavily influenced by them.

At this point I rather doubt the sanity of people still sticking to iptables tbh.

So there is approximately one concept of "packet filter done right". UI madness is on UI authors.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#47

Post by bluedino »

This really takes me back. My first actual 'use' for Linux was making routers out of leftover computers.

The perfect machine back then was a 100MHz Pentium, in a slimline desktop case. At the time, the Pentium III was the current desktop chip, so you'd have a pile of early Pentium-class machines to use. And even a 10mb ISA network card (3Com if possible) would have plenty of power for the internet connections of the day. But 100mb PCI cards were still fairly cheap.

Install two NICs, load your favorite Linux distro, and then follow the IP-Masquerading HOWTO and you've got internet access for the whole apartment building, office, or LAN party.

Eventually I moved on to Linux Firewalls by Robert Ziegler for a base to build on.

After that I started piling other services on, like a spam filter, Squid cache, it was amazing to get so much use out of hardware that was going to just get thrown out.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#48

Post by fio_ini »

I am truly sorry. I can't understand the physical networking from the pics or the description... I'm probably just missing something. There is one blue plug going from the laptop to the cisco switch or the pci wifi module? I see a blue plug going to each device. So I'm guessing everything is plugged into the cisco switch?

if you could show all the wiring and label it (according to the table below) i think it would add a lot of value for someone less familiar with these kinds of setups (like me)

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#49

Post by VorpalWay »

stavros wrote: post #42
LatticeAnimal wrote: post #14

I’ve been using OpnSense/pfsense [0] for years and would highly recommend it. It has a great automatic update experience, config backups, builtin wireguard tunnels and advanced features like packet filtering options via suricata. When I am doing network management on my weekends, I’m so glad I’m not stuck in the Linux terminal learning about networking internals and can instead just go to a webui and configure my rou…

I'm at a stage where I don't want to be doing network management on my weekends. I have a Ubiquiti router that's pretty good, and for my router I'd like something like TrueNAS for my NAS, a distribution that completely turns the hardware into an appliance I can configure once and forget about. Is there something like that?

Pfsense/opnsense would be one option (based on FreeBSD). For Linux there is OpenWRT, which you can either run as an alternative firmware on quite a few consumer routers/access points, or install on a PC or Pi or similar.

Caveat: I have only used OpenWRT on a high end consumer router (GL.inet MT6000) out of those. That works well, anything else is based on reading about people using those options.

For all of those, once you set it up you don't really need to do much except install updates a couple of times per year, or if you want to forward a new port or such.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#50

Post by avhception »

bluedino wrote: post #47

This really takes me back. My first actual 'use' for Linux was making routers out of leftover computers. The perfect machine back then was a 100MHz Pentium, in a slimline desktop case. At the time, the Pentium III was the current desktop chip, so you'd have a pile of early Pentium-class machines to use. And even a 10mb ISA network card (3Com if possible) would have plenty of power for the internet connections of the…

Ha, that's very close to my story as well. I had a 166Mhz Pentium and it was all PCI cards and 100mbit by then. That was essentially the start of my career.
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