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How to turn anything into a router

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Re: How to turn anything into a router

#61

Post by tombert »

nottorp wrote: post #59

Hmm I've always had a manually configured low power generic box as router. But I've never even tried to set up my own access point, I just pay Unifi for that [1]. The software part is doable but I don't want to learn to handle the signal issues. [1] Switched to Unifi in anger after my first consumer level 5 Ghz wifi needed reboots weekly because it was overheating. Do yourself a favour and get the semi pro stuff, Uni…

I've been running a custom router for about a decade, but I too have haven't tried handling the wifi on my own. It's always been easy to get an external access point and there's a bit of a guarantee that it's done correctly.

I kind of feel like that's cheating though; I've outsourced the hardest part of the project to someone else. Maybe one of these days I'll take an old NUC or something and buy a decent wifi antenna for it and try and do it properly.

[1] Initially pfsense, then OpnSense, then ClearOS, and now some custom firewall rules in NixOS.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#62

Post by bitwize »

Qotom mini PCs are my cheatcode. These little PCs are often available with multiple NICs, and I use one as a wifi bridge/router for my office network. Put Linux or FreeBSD on one and you have a very capable little network-appliance box.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#63

Post by HugoTea »

ghc wrote: post #57

Here I was thinking this article would tell me how to turn my unmanaged switches into routers, but no, "anything" actually means "any fully featured general purpose computer with networking".

I suppose if you manage to get OpenWRT or something onto your switch you could use it as a router.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#64

Post by tombert »

solarkraft wrote: post #52

Maybe someone in this thread has a couple of ideas: What’s the simplest way to spin up a simple „cattle, not pet“ routing VM? I don’t want to mess with any state, I just want version controllable config files. Ideally, if applying a version fails, it would automatically roll back to the previous state. OpenWRT seems like it fits my description most closely, but maybe someone here is a fan of something more flashy/mod…

I recommend Pfsense or OpnSense if your hardware works with a FreeBSD-based thing. They're super easy to set up and don't have many surprises.

After I upgraded to a 10GbE ethernet card in my previous router, my card didn't work correctly with FreeBSD-based stuff anymore. I changed to ClearOS and that was actually comparably easy to Pfsense...maybe even easier? I recommend checking that one out.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#66

Post by Hikikomori »

JohnFen wrote: post #21
Tostino wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a whole lot of normal people using mesh networking Wi-Fi routers. Honestly, most of the least technical people that I know are all using mesh networks because their houses require it.

Certainly. But it's still a minority use case. Perhaps someone else will (or did) write up a how-to for support mesh networking in your homebrew router.

Home mesh is mostly about having wireless backhaul, and you can certainly do that if you have (preferably) two radios, you just set up one radio as a client to your main AP.

Even if you aren't doing wireless backhaul you just rely on regular client behaviour to transition between APs, can enable 802.11r to improve this.

Enterprise "mesh" typically uses wired backhaul for performance and can help clients roam quicker with a controller (auth, not deciding to roam). Controller can also adjusts radio power so APs aren't talking over each other if they're too close.

Mesh isn't any magic, just regular wifi.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#69

Post by thenthenthen »

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…

Inverted case here, my first real use cases for Linux was flashing routers with openwrt and doing fun stuff!

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#70

Post by burner420042 »

zoobab wrote: post #45

Love the "An ExpressCard-PCIe bridge in the ThinkPad’s expansion bay". Would you have a picture of the ExpressCard laptop connector?

I did this back when, just using a 100mbit NIC express card.

Ran openbsd for a few years like that, the base OS included everything needed. I recall it used 24MB of ram and closer to 30MB if ssh'd in. It was very handy to have a local login when playing with firewall rules.

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