Putting Freebsd on little Wi-Fi router devices

Post by erikarn » Mon, May 18, 2015, 5:28 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #13

rsync wrote: post #11

My primary use-case in small border firewalls like this is running sshuttle on them as a lightweight VPN. The problem is, FreeBSD cannot properly run sshuttle - it can do it for regular traffic, and it works well, but it cannot do DNS lookups for the entire network over the tunnel. This shortcoming is documented by the sshuttle README @ github.[1] I am very interested in having this fixed / worked around and am willi…

You sure you linked the right repo? There are forks with newer activity, and the linked readme doesn't say anything about DNS not working? (Or I'm to tired right now to find it) Is any of the forks a new "official" version?

Post by feld » Mon, May 18, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

pyvpx wrote: post #16

seanp2k2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not $50 and you probably don't already own one, but it can be done on the Uniquiti EdgeRouter Lite ($100, runs Debian MIPS + Vyatta as the default officially-supported Ubiquiti image but very hackable): http://rtfm.net/FreeBSD/ERL/

to get the performance people are constantly raving about, you need the very proprietary binary blobs that take full advantage of the Cavium hardware acceleration. otherwise it's just another beefy MIPS machine.

Post by J_Darnley » Mon, May 18, 2015, 6:36 PM UTC

erikarn wrote: post #18

pyvpx wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's impossible to squeeze relatively recent (9 or 10) FreeBSD versions down to that size. The linked git repo makes mention of needing at least 8MB for some builds. And you don't get IPv6 at that size.

Yup. OpenWRT uses (patched!) Linux, but with a much smaller set of libraries/utilities to fit in small storage footprints. I'm using ye normal FreeBSD libc, libcrypto, etc - things are pretty big. It could be fun to take something like the BSD kernel and an alternative BSD licenced userland to make a much smaller footprint device, but I don't have the energy to /also/ do that. If someone would like to do that then pl…

Post by Freaky » Mon, May 18, 2015, 6:53 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #22

> Others have added ipfw support to do NAT and firewalling - I'm going to add configuration rules for NAT, IPFW and routing soon so it's all integrated. I thought that most of the BSD world had transitioned to PF at this point. I checked FreeBSD handbook and indeed all three firewalls are supported: IPF, IPFW, PF. Are the older ones still really relevant?

Post by erikarn » Mon, May 18, 2015, 7:26 PM UTC

J_Darnley wrote: post #25

erikarn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. OpenWRT uses (patched!) Linux, but with a much smaller set of libraries/utilities to fit in small storage footprints. I'm using ye normal FreeBSD libc, libcrypto, etc - things are pretty big. It could be fun to take something like the BSD kernel and an alternative BSD licenced userland to make a much smaller footprint device, but I don't have the energy to /also/ do that. If someone would like to do that then pl…

Can you build a BSD on a case-insensitive file system? I wanted to look at modifying openwrt to fit on my routers but I was shocked to discover that linux needs a case-sensitve file system to build. Anyway, it was a good read, thanks.