Everything that's old is new again. Raise your hand if this is how you first got into Linux.<p>I needed to share a spectacularly slow DSL line with my college roommates. Soultion? Cobble together a router out of a cheap Pentium box, a PCI DSL modem, a 10mbit ISA nic, and Debian. Oh, and a couple of days of tinkering.<p>Ah ipchains. Those were the days.
This article has motivated me to do this for my parents. They are plagued by wireless reliability problems. I added another WiFi router at the other end of the house and bridged over Ethernet (it was a PITA to configure bridging in the extension router's firmware). I'm not even sure if it helps, though I did ensure that the two APs are operating on the two least-noisy channels. I regularly have connectivity problems when I visit, and feel bad that they have to deal with it on a regular basis. Updating to newer consumer routers has only offered marginal improvements.<p>Their house actually has acquired quite a bit of CAT 5E runs to the far corners, so I'm thinking about getting them a router (small x64 machine as described in the blog post), a gigabit Ethernet switch, and some Ethernet-connected WiFi APs around the house.<p>Does anyone have experience with Ubiquiti APs? They seem to understand that they exist primarily to bridge WiFi and Ethernet, not solve every networking related problem on Earth. I have to say, my WiFi experience at the office improved dramatically after the AirPorts and Cisco APs were tossed for Ubiquiti...
Just a quick shout-out for pfSense as an excellent router OS. I've been playing around with ClearOS, DD-WRT, m0n0wall, Smoothwall, Shorewall, etc. (as well as many of my own home-grown solutions) for years and nothing even comes close to the features and performance offered by pfSense. DD-WRT is close but you're extremely limited in terms of the hardware it will run on (think WRT54G/L units with ancient processors and 16MB RAM). Not to dismiss all those other efforts but pfSense is at least worth a try. The writer of this article seems to disregard it off the bat but it's worth the time investment if you're looking for something secure and stable with features like Snort, VPN, traffic shaping, country blocking, DNSBL... the list goes on and on! Plus, it gave me an excuse to finally get my feet wet with FreeBSD. :-)
Just as a PSA, there are zillions of _very_ nice $300-$350 15w TDP Broadwell x86 boxes, with 4-8GB RAM, 64/128GB SSD, bundled WiFi, and dual gigabit ethernet ports on aliexpress. I don't know why there are so many broadwell boxes on offer, but these are a stellar deal for the price, and are fully solid state, super flexible, extremely fast anything x86 boxes.<p>For example:
<a href="http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fanless-i5-Mini-PC-Windows-Barebone-PC-Broadwell-Intell-Core-i5-5200U-2-7GHz-4K-HTPC/32366202925.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fanless-i5-Mini-PC-Windows-Ba...</a><p>I initally looked on Amazon and found the fitlet-i, which is nice for a 4.5w TDP AMD box..<p><a href="http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/specifications/fitlet-models-specifications/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/specifications/fitlet-mod...</a><p>.. but these aliexpress deals are far better, and easily 3x faster if you can afford the 15w TDP budget.
> As far as the routers are concerned, there's no difference between maintaining connections to thousands of individual IP addresses or just to thousands of ports on the same IP address.<p>Has anyone tested this? It makes intuitive sense, but things are often surprising in the performance/optimization world.
I don't want a 17W Celeron on all day, every day. I want something like an ARM Cortex-A57. Powerful (and possibly well beyond 17W) but with "big.little" cores that just turn off in low load situations.<p>When is the ARM universe going to get serious about desktop-style construction? The chips are getting fast enough for anything now so they're going to have to end this ridiculous throwaway culture soon.<p>How about standard memory and accessory slots for starters. Something <i>I</i> can upgrade when I want faster network.
I thought about building a new router myself, but I decided against it.<p>Two reasons: i could not hit the price point of a off-the-shelf-solution and I was worried about energy efficiency.<p>However I switched from consumer gear to a more professional stuff, using Unifi APs as wireless APs and a n EdgeRouter X as router - the four available gigabit-ports are enough to support the network.
This article has spawned a few questions. My apartment building is hooked up to a fiber optics line, and it enters my living room through a coax cable. I'm still using the stock router, and the performance has been absolutely <i>abysmal</i>. In short, my connection gets dropped entirely for minutes at a time. I'll usually get 20 minutes of internet, and then 2-5 minutes of outage.<p>Here's the rub: I have more devices than the normal person:<p>- 1x home-built NAS, via ethernet<p>- 1x desktop, via ethernet<p>- 1x laptop, again via wifi<p>- 1x mobile phone, via wifi<p>Could the outages be due to having an under-powered router? Are there any simple tests I could run to diagnose the problem further?<p>Off the top of my head, the usual internet speed-test battery indicates that my performance behaves as advertised, so it would seem that the problem isn't with the fiber line <i>per se</i>.<p>A related question: the article here left me a bit confused. Did the author end up finding a router that could take a coaxial input?
11 days ago, I bought a new $200 ADSL2/Wifi router. 10 days ago I was moved on to a fibre connection (yay!). This has removed the need for the very specific Broadcom ADSL chip/DAC that I needed to maintain a stable connection.<p>The particular router I'm using has a 2.6.36 based kernel and some of the worst web UI work I've seen, not to mention a very unstable version of udhcpd.<p>With my new net connection all I need is something that has an Ethernet card and can do a PPPoE handshake - now to find an ARM box with 4+ gigabit NICs...
So, I have a circa-2012, dual core atom machine with 2GB of RAM. It has two ethernet ports and six SATA. I was using it as a NAS, but apparently one of the SATA controllers went bust.<p>The author mentions that he was specifically looking for the newer celerons. Any specific reason? Just because of OpenVPN? Wouldn't such an atom machine be able to handle this load?<p>What about if I set it up to have the VPN only for torrents, for example?
I have a similar box with OpenBSD which I've been running for about five years now. No hiccups or pain. Added the Ubiquiti APs last year when I started wanting wireless.<p>I could possibly replace the hardware to cover the next five years of power consumption difference though. That's not so much an issue with the new little Celerons though.
It sure is easy to throw lots of CPU processing power at the problem and get a fast router.
But for $40 less, the Nighthawk additionally includes 2 WiFi chips, a whole lot of software engineering and a probably much lower power consumption due to specialized hardware e.g. for NAT offloading.
<p><pre><code> swapping in new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with increasing Internet speeds available in the area
upgraded from 1.5-9mbps traditional T1 connections to 50mbps coax (cable)
</code></pre>
Easter Europe is laughing at you
Is there anyway to make a router using just a single port ethernet? I'd like to have an Intel NUC to act as the main router, but it has only a single ethernet port.
How would performance stack up versus the consumer routers if you just used a Raspberry Pi B+ / Zero, with additional network interfaces added via USB?