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How to turn anything into a router

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Re: How to turn anything into a router

#81

Post by burner420042 »

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…

So it's been awhile but the best and simplest way I think is use an access point. I don't want my wireless gear doing routing. From a logic stand point they acts as wireless "bridge" to the physical network, and nothing more. DHCP, etc. stay handled in one place for the entire network, back on the physical router.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#82

Post by nullpoint420 »

moqmar wrote: post #79
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…

That sounds like you might like VyOS. I found it to be relatively easy to achieve exactly what I wanted, but went back to a GUI as it turned out I wanted a pet and not start a farm.

> but went back to a GUI as it turned out I wanted a pet and not start a farm.

This made me chuckle, I'm definitely going to quote this the next time our K8S cluster has issues

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#83

Post by gruez »

nathas wrote: post #75
hmaxwell wrote: post #73

I'm curious about the policy rationale behind banning router imports. If a government were considering legislation like that, what would the primary concern usually be? Given that so much internet traffic is now protected by TLS/SSL and other encryption, why would it still matter if citizens were using routers that might be backdoored? Is the concern mainly things like botnets and DDoS activity, weak default credenti…

It's everything you mention in the second paragraph, and additionally just the ability to turn them off. Imagine everyone had their routers disabled simultaneously. I don't know if the cell networks could function with the surge in standard traffic that would happen, and then you've effectively plunged all or part of the country into a communication blackout. I think "turn it off permanently by bricking it" is almost…

>Imagine everyone had their routers disabled simultaneously. I don't know if the cell networks could function with the surge in standard traffic that would happen, and then you've effectively plunged all or part of the country into a communication blackout.

IME cell networks definitely can't cope with a loss of all routers in an area, given how mobile data becomes basically unusable when there's a power outage. That said, "everyone had their routers disabled" is probably not realistic, given that there are plenty of non-chinese router vendors.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#85

Post by radlad »

lstodd wrote: post #44
ZenoArrow wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The primary reason I stick to iptables instead of nft is that I already learned iptables decades ago, and some software I interact with still defaults to iptables and/or does not have full support for nft.

Why do you doubt the sanity of people sticking to iptables? What makes nft compelling?

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#86

Post by maybe_pablo »

I did kind of the opposite, I made my main beefy gaming computer the router, then connected to it a nice wireless AP in bridge mode to serve internet to the rest of the computers. That way I can have a local llm agent manage my network and firewall by simply asking.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#87

Post by craftkiller »

lstodd wrote: post #44
ZenoArrow wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> nftables are heavily influenced by them

Are they? I recently had to learn nftables and they seem to be iptables but with a slightly nicer syntax and without pre-defined chains. But otherwise, nftables directly maps to iptables and neither of them seem similar to pf.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#88

Post by wtallis »

HugoTea wrote: post #63
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.

That's theoretically possible but a bad idea for a managed switch, because they seldom have enough CPU performance or IO between the CPU and switch silicon to provide respectable routing performance. For an unmanaged switch, it's more likely that whatever CPU core is present (if any) doesn't have enough resources to run a real network stack.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#89

Post by gruez »

estimator7292 wrote: post #22
louwrentius wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have gigabit fiber and none of this is an issue. VLAN hopping is only possible due to misconfiguration. I'd like to be proven otherwise if that's not the case. VLANs are used EVERYWHERE where it matters. And no, the single port is absolutely not a bottleneck because the port is full-duplex.

What happens if one node on your network is downloading at 1Gbit and another is uploading at 1Gbit? Both get 500Mbit. Bottleneck.

That's going to be super rare. If it's just LAN traffic it shouldn't hit your router at all and you won't have the bottleneck issue. The actual cases would need to be quite contrived, like you're backing up your media library at the same time you're updating cod warzone.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#90

Post by accrual »

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…

I briefly put a Pentium MMX 200MHz system in service a few years back to bridge my parents to their neighbor's WiFi (with consent of course) when their DSL line was down for a few days. I installed a PCI Ethernet and WiFi card, booted into OpenBSD, and amazingly it was fast enough to get them through the downtime. :)
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