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How to turn anything into a router

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Re: How to turn anything into a router

#91

Post by miladyincontrol »

tombert wrote: post #64
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.

While I am a linux advocate for networking in the current day outside of hyper specific CDN use cases (a la netflix)... its pretty common for people to just virtualize opnsense/pfsense to take advantage of linux network drivers. Especially if their actual routing requirements are modest and dont require full use of the hardware.

Beyond getting support for devices completely absent on freebsd, quality of drivers, bugs much more rapidly squashed, and general misc features absent on the bsd side like NBASE-T.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#92

Post by thequux »

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…

NixOS using https://github.com/thequux/nix-zone-firewall/ worked well for me for many years. I only stopped using it because my poor embedded Linux machine started having issues and it made more sense to go with a Mikrotik than to buy a new device to run as a soft router.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#95

Post by sta1n »

louwrentius wrote: post #3

A router only really needs one network interface. Any computer with a single network interface, maybe even an (old) laptop, can be used. Anything x86 from at least the last 10 years is energy efficient and fast enough to route at gigabit speed. If you don't care about energy usage, any x86-based computer from the last 20 years is fast enough. The magic trick is to use VLANs, which require switches that support VLANs,…

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Re: How to turn anything into a router

#96

Post by StillBored »

I've got one of those N100+10Gbit router devices with a handful of ports. It seems a pretty reasonable device with one of the router distros running on it, but it doesn't seem nearly as efficient as my ucg-fiber/route10 devices, and that wouldn't bother me except that I suspect the packet latency is significantly higher too. Those devices AFAIK have hardware programmable router chips, which means the forwarding is done 100% without the interaction of the main CPU, so there isn't any interrupt/polling/etc delays when a packet arrives, the header gets rewritten, the checksum verified and off it goes.

Anyone actually measured this? I see a lot of bandwidth/etc style tests but few that can show the actual impact of enabling disabling deep packet inspection and a few of the other metrics that I actually care about. Serve the home seems to have gotten some fancy test HW but they don't seem to be running these kinds of tests yet.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#97

Post by zer00eyz »

I live in the SF Bay Area, and ended up with Sonic Internet, and a 10gbe connection. Routing this with anything off the shelf was going to be "very expensive".

I ended up with an Opnsense box. It's an m920q (i5-8500), with riser card and a dual SFP+ nic in it. All in, it was less than 200 bucks (now it would be closer to three). I ended up with a cheap, Chinese "media converter" (from aliexpress because the same thing on amazon is 3x the price) that just had two SFP+ ports on it. That let me go from an SPF+ copper ethernet module to a DAC and not dump a bunch of heat into the 1L pc.

I have to say that the functionality made it a worth while investment: traffic shaping, wireguard and the like have been mostly a joy. And the documentation for Opnsense made the setup and use (mostly) easy.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#99

Post by tanvach »

Anyone has done mesh WiFi (ideally triband) using off the shelf parts and Linux?

I have an Orbi AX system which works reliably, but now I want to upgrade the radio to WiFi 7 and that means I need to upgrade all the hardware.

Hoping to move to using off the shelf parts so in the future I can just change the radio (ideally bunch of USB sticks).

I understand this is not strictly just the router. I can (and used to have) a router as separate device, but any mesh WiFi right now that I can find need a pricy router that acts as the coordinator, essentially negates the economic benefits.

Re: How to turn anything into a router

#100

Post by StillBored »

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 recently dumped opnsense because they took a stand against a few things I was trying to do (ex, webUI on wan port IIRC) which make sense at a high level. But I _HATE_ devices that think they know better than me. I was trying to configure it on a _LAN_ such that the identified WAN side was actually my local lan, and I spent an hour hacking it to work and was like "you know if they can't get this shit right i'm out". There are a lot of places in the technology world where someone who thinks they understand my use case makes a decision based on some narrow world view because they can't understand that not everyone trying to use their product is some idiot home user using it for their home network.
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