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Done, even cheaper ;)

Well, that's a more complete list than I could put together, but here's another x86 SoC that's been used in cheapo consumer wifi routers. Supported by OpenWRT.

Other than Apple Airport Extreme, are there any IPv6 ready ADSL/Cable routers?

Anything running OpenWRT will do.

i'm purely taking this at "Network Attached Storage" verbatim word definition, i'm not sure how this jibes with everybody else's definitions...

i run openWRT on a linksys wrtsl54gs. installed the usb storage drivers, installed samba, attached a hub and multiple usb hard drives. no need to keep a pc up and running all day and still have easy local and remote access to files. i also attached a thumb drive purely for use by the router's os since you can fill up the flash on the router pretty quick installing your favorite extensions.

i haven't tried any of the rsync, etc. stuff for backups, so my ass is out in the wind as far as data reliability. ymmv.

it looks nothing like any other linux distro

Neither does IPodLinux or Puppy Linux, or OpenWRT, both of which are designed to run on machines with even worse specs than the XO-1. However, they have very active user communities and are able to run a lot of "mainstream" Linux software (not so much on the IPod, but you'd be surprised!).

I think the idea that if a project isn't using high-end hardware and running a "Top 5" linux distro then it's somehow alienated from the open source community is ignoring the long tradition of running Linux on unconventional platforms. The history of Linux and open source strongly suggests that it will be possible, if not trivial, to port all sorts of mainstream software to a totally new hardware platform.

You're correct that the x86 instruction set is still cruft, and a pure RISC CPU is theoretically more efficient. However, the real world disadvantage of x86 support is minimal. With each die shrink, the x86 to micro-op translator occupies less die space proportionally, and the advantages of the installed hardware and software base gives x86 CPUs a huge lead in economies of scale.

I know we're both just putting different spins on the same facts, but in the end, practical considerations outweigh engineering purity. x86 is even competing against ARM in the embedded space now, not just in higher powered UMPCs, but also routers too like this one with a 486 class CPU.

You want a WRT54G, which can be had dirt cheap, and be flashed to many specialized Linux distributions, some of which have LEAF. One example is http://openwrt.org/.

Anybody still running an old standalone computer as a Linux software firewall probably pays enough in electricity to buy a new WRT54G or similar router every few months.

Oh, come off it, NDPTAL85. That's not even dimly officially supported at this point. I can also put a custom Linux distro on my Linksys router, but that's not exactly supported, either--and I certainly wouldn't call someone who said I couldn't install Apache on my Linksys "lying."

It's okay that the iPhone has some weaknesses right now. Having a fully locked-down phone for the moment means that Apple can guarantee a consistent user experience, minimize their phone crashing, and rigidly enforce a consistent set of UI guidelines. I'm still optimistic that the next version of the iPhone, or maybe even a later update, will come with a true, officially supported SDK. For the moment, though, pointing out that some hackers have managed to circumvent the iPhone's lock-down does not count as allowing third-party apps in the way that a Palm does.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying this, but in a day when I expect to do firmware/bios updates on my motherboard, raid controller, routers (and there's even alternate firmware options like OpenWRT), and possibly even a video card. Guess what, even your monitors and TVs can have firmware updates now! What's the big deal about getting a firmware update on a hard drive?

It seems to me that the only reason people make a big deal out of this is that historically nobody is used to updating their hard drives.

Keep in mind how much of a modern graphics card's abilities are now located in software.

Yes. But does that mean software that runs on a CPU on the graphics card, or software that runs on the system CPU, stealing cycles from it? The latter is what some manufacturers are doing, and should not be doing. For software that runs on the graphics card CPU, it doesn't need to run either in kernel space or user space ... that's another space we can call "hardware space". It has no access to kernel APIs or user APIs, nor should it have that.

Imagine for a moment if X Windows were the universal graphical system on (nearly) call computers. It isn't due to the likes of Microsoft, but just imagine it were. What we could have is a graphics card with a CPU on the card that implements an X Windows server. Then all you need is a way to shuffle all the messages that go between applications and X across the bus between system CPU and graphics card.

Now X might not be the best interface design, and certainly would not be for gaming, a better design certainly can be made. But even X would be faster than it is now with the server on the card (quite doable today). And still, the window manager would run in user space.

I wouldn't be surprised in the least if the interface between CPU and graphics card was a tightly guarded secret - main bus bandwidth, and bandwidth in general, is one of the major bottlenecks on graphics systems right now.

That interface should be nothing more than the information of what the system and applications expect the graphics card to display, an encapsulation protocol to organize it into messages and responses, and a basic way to stream it across the bus (like PCI-Express x16, for an example with high performance). Those messages may possibly be a reflection of the graphical API calls done by the applications.

... those restrictions would either have to be moved into hardware (expensive) or disabled (causes horrific problems with the FCC.)

What do you think is happening now with quite a number of wireless routers being booted (or boosted) with Linux or BSD on them?

We're well past the point where hardware interfaces can be described in half a dozen pages. We're well past the point where "hardware devices" even exist entirely in hardware. Most interesting hardware devices have complex interfaces that depend on functioning backend software.

That is certainly something that is happening. But it most certainly is not something that is necessary. What we have these days in designs are the result of companies trying to cut their costs with the consumers be damned. These are bad designs, not so much because they steal CPU power from the consumer's computer, but more so because they create these massively complex interfaces that keep changing all the time, and driver code that is so buggy it is frequently the source of systemwide crashes or data corruption. At least if that buggy code is moved into a process, it can do its thing without taking down the whole system.

But we shouldn't have to be doing that. The hardware specific code should be inside the hardware, running on the CPU that comes as part of that hardware. Upgrades can be provided by the system CPU as a checksummed and, if necessary, cryptographically signed, blob (via a unified firmware image upload interface design that all devices should share that includes device match checks to be sure the correct image is loaded). Then maybe we'll start getting some real value add out of things like video cards, instead of getting cards that result in a net loss of CPU power when added in.

Take a look at the differences between two systems/groups that parallel your questions.

Sveasoft on the commercial side.

OpenWRT or DD-WRT on the Open Source side.

And if you are familiar with the discussions/flame wars around this platform and code, I think it's safe to say there's a market for either one. Albeit, sometimes there's bad blood between closed source companies and the Open Source community, other entities who have profit as their prime motivator instead of passion for the idea have and do work and play well with the community.

At the end of the day, the choice is still yours since it is after your Source.

I too am a little unclear as to what the advantage of this would be. It does not seem to be a hardware firewall, but a software firewall running (somewhat) independently from your computer.

Personally I prefer my set up where I normally run behind my ASUS WL-500g, that is running PacketProtector, which is a handy one stop shop for Linux (OpenWRT) and a suite of security tools (firewall, VPN, IPS, AV and more), plus given that it is running Linux, if there is something else that you want or need you can run other Linux applications to meet those needs, or if you are more adventurous, build your own...

Why not use your low-power embedded router as your 'always-on' system?

Grab a Linksys WRTSL54GS or some other supported model and install OpenWRT. From there you can install GNU screen, a torrent client, an IRC client, and an instant messaging client of your choosing. The device has a USB 2.0 port so you can attach a large external hard drive or multi-GB flash drive for your torrent downloads.

You'd have to get use to using CLI tools, or if you so choose, you can engineer something web-based using an embedded web server.

This device can remain on 24/7 and consumes about 7-10 watts. On the plus side, you can also use OpenWRT to apply QoS to your torrent downloads so you can keep rocking your FPS or webcam pauselessly on your power-sapping neon-lit dual SLI Aurora.

Why not use your low-power embedded router as your 'always-on' system?

Grab a Linksys WRTSL54GS or some other supported model and install OpenWRT. From there you can install GNU screen, a torrent client, an IRC client, and an instant messaging client of your choosing. The device has a USB 2.0 port so you can attach a large external hard drive or multi-GB flash drive for your torrent downloads.

You'd have to get use to using CLI tools, or if you so choose, you can engineer something web-based using an embedded web server.

This device can remain on 24/7 and consumes about 7-10 watts. On the plus side, you can also use OpenWRT to apply QoS to your torrent downloads so you can keep rocking your FPS or webcam pauselessly on your power-sapping neon-lit dual SLI Aurora.

I'll explain the difference: in the Linksys case the company didn't supply source code but did use Open Source software, and the GPL clearly states you have to do this.
Result: Linksys folded and opened its code (this is 2003, mind you) and nowadays we have http://www.openwrt.org/ and http://www.dd-wrt.com/. And I'm sure Linksys doesn't mind all the interest in its products.
In the case of the BSA, they bribe disgruntled ex-workers to rat of their ex-bosses. When they knock on your door they're accompanied by a police officer (at least here) and you're told to leave alone every computer in the office until they've run (yes, run) their little tools.
So, I think I do like the EFF better.

I can recommend the X-Wrt add-on suite for OpenWrt. It replaces the OpenWrt webif (web interface) with webif^2, which is much-improved. It adds a lot more control, many more options, real-time performance graphs, and all sorts of neat things. Installation was a single command, or you can do it via a web page.

And OpenWRT runs on quite a few other routers other than Linksys. I'm running OpenWRT on my WL-500g Premium (8mb flash, 32mb ram) for example and I love it.

Yeah, I got one of that WRT54G from linksys, but it happens to be a v5 router preloaded with vxWorks proprietary operational system. Linksys' WRT54G and WRT54GS v5, v5.1 and v6 versions got less flash (2 mb flash memory and 8 mb of ram instead of 4 mb flash and 16 mb ram from other versions), It's possible to load a very minimal OpenWRT firmware into it, but it wont give you all advantages that you got with more storage.

The best model for using OpwnWRT are the "L" series (WRT54GL) that according to Linksys, are built specially for the Linux modding comunity.

Don't buy v5 or v6 if you want to use OpenWRT.Consult this page before acquiring a router: http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware?action=sho w&redirect=toh

I've been using a D-Link 524 router for a while in my home setup. It's given me nothing but trouble, rebooting and randomly blocking computers on the network [part of it's built-in security junk, it's blocking logs show it will block perfectly valid computers for random reasons]. Firmware updates don't seem to fix it.

I got tired of that and searched for a router capable of running OpenWRT in case the default firmware sucked.

I found the Asus WL-500g Premium and bought that for about $100 at the time. The default firmware worked fine, but I decided to try openWRT, then tossed that in favor of X-Wrt which had a better web interface.

The router's current uptime is 37 days with no crashes or any oddities what so ever. Last restart was for a firmware reflash.

As for reception, try lesser-used channels. 6 is a really common channel, so try 1 or 11 instead [or any other channel].

Note however, that if you go the path of openWRT or X-wrt, you're going to have to spend some time working out the kinks at first. Mine worked fine, except wifi couldn't access wan, which took a bit to figure out how to fix it; openWRT's wiki and forum were a big help in figuring out that.

It was a striped down Linux distro. Ok, they had to put it together, perhaps write some shell scripts.

Well, if that's all it was, why is OpenWRT offered as an example by another responder to my post? Apparently, some work was required to go from a "Linux distro" to "Linksys firmware" — and that work is now available to all because of GPL.

And I'm not saying, it is bad. But it certainly is something, a "PHB" is justified to be concerned about.

Quote: "I'm not aware of anybody benefiting from this open-sourcing, however, and this lack of benefits (from vendors being wrestled into releasing their "GPL-tainted" code) was my main point."

There are a lot of people benefiting from this actually.
Ever heard of http://www.hyperwrt.org/ and http://openwrt.org/ ?

Now you can actually run a webserver on this device.

Granted, you can create a discussion about the commercial value of it all, but it certainly has a very high educational value. Also, this code (with some modifications) could be used on other/similar devices as well.
The way I see it, this is a big win. Instead of reinventing the wheel people can now start off with the already existing code. And I bet Linksys is actually selling more devices because of openwrt instead of less, so Linksys has won too.

A Linksys WRT54GL, running OpenWRT. I'm in the midst of replacing my 486-based firewall and cheap 802.11 access point with it.

there are a number of ways, from deep packet inspection (studying packets and throttling those that appear BT-ish) to just cutting the uplink speed for a naughty subscriber. i think i my ISP may have done that to me already, judging by my ratios.

i do my own traffic shaping in my house with a linksys router running openwrt and x-wrt. i do all my BT stuff from a vmware machine dedicated to all things BT (a win2k workstation running uTorrent) and i told the QOS config to file all traffic to and from his internal IP as bulk. i also use QOS to give priority to all traffic to and from my VOIP telephone adapter.

in case you are not a linksys firmware freak... putting openwrt on your router is like upgrading your PC to openBSD. loading x-wrt on your openwrt router is like installing KDE on your openBSD machine.

the result is BT can leech and seed 24x7x365, the humans in the house can surf and game unimpeeded and phone calls suffer no jitter from MMORPGS or BT.

i feel sort of like a hypocrite for being a net neutrality fanboy and using QOS inside my firewall... but at least i can trust myself to not degrade my access in favor of my own proprietary offerings.

some may say i am a little too trusting, but i have known me for a long time... i think we can trust eachother.

OpenWRT on the WRT54G(S) allows you to setup an OpenVPN server. Convenient, though the throughput isn't spectacular, due to the processing requirements demanded by SSL on the WRT CPU.

See http://martybugs.net/wireless/openwrt/openvpn.cgi and http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=1800.

I've also been working with developpement programmes in Africa for quite a few years now. Mostly francophone sub-saharan regions. I don't know of any area there where US$100 could feed a village for a year.

There is a large "middle class" in Africa. Many people live in adequate homes, they have jobs, they have a reasonable level of education, electricity as reliable as the national network, basic levels of health care. They have money, not huge amounts by western standards, but enough to live well by local standards. Africans love to show off their wealth. After they have their neatly painted house, a car, some nice clothing, they look further down Maslow's hierarchy for where to spend their money. What every one wants are flashy consumer electronics. Most have mobile phones. Many have computers, TVs, VCRs and DVD players, and satellite dishes. What they are all screaming for right now is internet access. Just having access to email from their home is a way of not only showing off wealth, but showing a touch of modernity.

I helped a group set up a wireless network a while back. Every time one of their guys came up to Europe for a meeting or vacation, they'd head back down with two suit cases full of Linksys routers. We had found them a good bulk rate of about 30 euros per box. They had good technicians back in Africa who would reflash with OpenWRT, combined with some home crafted antennas, then they would set up relays across their country, radiating from the capital along major highways out to villages and wealthy sub-divisions. The wealthy would pay to get a flashed linksys box and an outside antenna setup, just to upstage their neighbors. Internet access outside the country would be just a trickle, but P-2-P inside the wireless network ran at reasonably good speeds.

Young people in a poor village in Africa are no different than anywhere else
You are right. There are cyber cafés everywhere with a small LAN, and every evening the places are full of kids playing counterstrike ;-)

I'm constantly amazed at the perception in Europe and the U.S. that Africa is mostly mud huts. There is wealth there, much of it from petroleum and mining, and as the education level comes up, outsourcing/globalisation is adding to local economies. Yes, there are some extremely poor people in the rural areas, but as long as their farms don't fail they get by well enough with sustenance levels.

I came to this thread hoping to get in a flamingly indignant post about the wrongness of the article, but I'm glad that many other slashdotters have already covered it for me. Kudos.

the AC

Sorry, I'll take my Linksys WRT54GS (v3) running OpenWRT or dd-wrt. Small, quiet, and wireless!

To DIY, put a distribution like OpenWRT on something like a Linksys WRT54G, that will give you all the flexibility you need to setup bandwidth management.

For an off the shelf solution, the Asus 500gl has various bandwidth management features. Haven't used it myself but it seems worth a look.

Uhhh.... I can go out and buy any number of devices around $50 that will all of this and much more with OpenWRT. Granted they aren't as small, but they almost all include 802.11g and several have USB2.0. For the increased capability, and reduced price, it's a far better deal unless you absolutely need something that tiny...

Uhhh.... I can go out and buy any number of devices around $50 that will all of this and much more with OpenWRT. Granted they aren't as small, but they almost all include 802.11g and several have USB2.0. For the increased capability, and reduced price, it's a far better deal unless you absolutely need something that tiny...

I just finished a little project for this; I have an external USB hard drive connected up to my wireless storage router (WRTSL54GS).

I installed OpenWRT http://www.openwrt.org/ firmware with rsync & samba. See http://wiki.openwrt.org/rsync-usb-sambaHowTo for info.

I access my files wirelessly through the router, and I use a cron job to have rsync make a remote copy to an off-site server. If I lose the drive, I have a backup copy; if I'd have a disaster (house burns down), I have a copy, and if I need to take my data with me, I can just unplug the drive and go.

- John

I just finished a little project for this; I have an external USB hard drive connected up to my wireless storage router (WRTSL54GS).

I installed OpenWRT http://www.openwrt.org/ firmware with rsync & samba. See http://wiki.openwrt.org/rsync-usb-sambaHowTo for info.

I access my files wirelessly through the router, and I use a cron job to have rsync make a remote copy to an off-site server. If I lose the drive, I have a backup copy; if I'd have a disaster (house burns down), I have a copy, and if I need to take my data with me, I can just unplug the drive and go.

- John

From the site:

http://wiki.openwrt.org/OpenWrtDocs/Configuration# head-1f582c0ad21a03a769e00c345743d6cf85ba878f

If it is doing it, it is doing it with vlans and not seperate ethernet interfaces. I will look into it further.

In any case, does anyone know of a small, low power box with the multiple ethernet interfaces I was asking about? (Or a good way to go about building one from easily available components?)

all the best,

drew
(da idea man)

I'd start by learning about the specialized distros for things like linksys. For example, http://www.openwrt.org/ . Google also has lots of things when last I checked. I'm currently running a WRT54GS (older non-broken version) with openwrt. I have a custom bash script that generates the iptables on boot, I run an openvpn client to bridge my home network with another network, and I have iptables rules that allow transparent http filtering and proxying through an external machine (the linksys isn't beefy enough to run squid, privoxy, dansguardian).

Wow.

TWO MONTHS AGO I paid EUR90 for an Asus WL-500gP router that does "offline" torrent downloads, runs linux and can have openWRT running.

Who'd pay $260?

I bought Asus WL500G Premium (wl500gp), a lighter version of the router from TFA. The hype is similar - Download with the PC turned off. The main difference is that wl500gp does not have a storage unit included and the user must attach one if wants to enjoy computerless leeching.

Bottomline:
- nice router - I live in an apartment, and I have all around coverage: 18MBps WLAN connection through a couple of walls, 1 - 1 1/2 feet thick each;
- buggy firmware - (e.g. the only way to set the date and time on router is to use the included and non-functional NTP client, no way to set or check the number of simultaneous NAT connections, no way to modify radio power)
- the Download Master does not work (the torrents fail to start)
- lame online support

I hope that the alternative firmware OSS projects (such as http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/index.php or http://www.wl500g.info/ or http://www.openwrt.org/ will provide a stable alternative.

How do you install any of those on a ROUTER?

With OpenWRT and any of a number of compatible routers.

http://openwrt.org/

Help people get the OpenWrt distro working on it: http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=4883.

OpenWRT (my preferred WRT54G firmware) has this scheduled, but not implemented.

https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/16 The ASUS firmware has it implemented, as does (supposedly) DD-Wrt.

Exactly. Just get OpenWrt or something simpler like DD-WRT; enable sshd; and there you go. You can log in to your router via SSH (root@192.168.1.1 probably, use the administrative password), and from there you can run iptables and all its related programs for network management. Of course, if you went with a Cisco router, you'd be able to do that much more easily, but those are kinda, well, expensive for home use...

Only the one, the WRT54GL. It's simply version 4 (the're now on 5) of the router. It sells for about a $10 premium, and is well worth it, with the functionality of openWRT.

Get a WRT54 - GL or whatever they're calling it. It's a great router.

Put openwrt on it. http://openwrt.org/

Don't wait. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/gree k_wiretappi.html

Can't currently find it on the wiki, but here is something related: http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=12215

Can the current GS still be flashed, or have they removed that except for the GL line?

Microsoft do sell wireless networking gear, and perhapse they are in fact eating their own dogfood in this case. Microsoft MN-700 seems to be running Linux.

Citation, please.

The Free Software Foundation doesn't seem to think they're violating GPL, and they're about as authoritative as one can get.

"NetBSD will you a run for your money with that statement: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/ "

NetBSD doesn't run on things like this http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/DellAximX50 It probably could be made to, but it doesnt. And gems such as this http://openwrt.org/ It might list the CPU on your page, but it just doesn't support the pieces of hardware I listed. Oh, and while I was looking around on that page on www.netbsd.org, the site went down, no more responses from the webserver. I'm serious, I could ping the site, but got no webpages from it, just that site others worked fine (and netcraft's 'refresh now' returned "We could not get any results for your selected site."). How about that as an example of reliability?

If BSD is so greatly designed, then why all the forks? Why isn't there a single BSD that is good at everything? Free/Net/Open... Needing so many forks is just a show of bad design. BSD is better engineered than Linux my butt.

"as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station."

Running an OS on a PC104 stack is not a port, it's just a (embedded) PC version. There is no PC104 or PC104+ SBC out there that doesn't run Linux.

But wanna boast about being in space? Your link says the NetBSD is to be launched in 2000... Debian Linux was on the STS-83 space shuttle mission back in April 1997.

http://linux.org.mt/article/space and http://www.faho.rwth-aachen.de/~matthi/linux/Linux InSpace.html

And this http://www.sheflug.co.uk/featuresoft.htm Linux flew a testflight on STS-80, and is intended to be used for something mission-critical as docking, not just gravity measurements. (http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/12/Linux_on_t he_International_Space_Station.pdf)

NASA didn't do projects like http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/ this just for fun... NASA chose Linux not BSD for Beowulf back in 1994 for a reason.

"Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC?"

I'm taking point with the statement that Linux was made by lowly 'PC hackers' while the BSD pedigree is made by the great 'Unix hackers'.

It's an example of the baseless elitist environment of BSD that shuns away so many.

BSD would get a lot more acceptance if the fans and developers would come from cloud nine back down to earth.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-clo1.htm

I really like OpenVPN. It works as a client or a server on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and other operating systems, and it is pretty easy to install, configure, and run. I just followed the how-to. It operates over UDP or TCP, you can tunnel it through HTTP or SOCKS proxies, and the server can use any cipher or hash available in the OpenSSL library. PPTP is ubiquitous, but it has serious flaws. IPSEC is supposed to be standard, but interoperability is a configuration nightmare (especially if you try to do something complex, like use X.509 certificates, or something non-standard, like authenticate users against RADIUS). Firewall/NAT traversal can present serious challenges in some cases as well, as some firewalls can't handle non-TCP/UDP protocols. CIPE requires special support in the operating system kernel and only works on Linux and Windows, and tunneling TCP over TCP (when running PPP over SSH) is a really bad idea.

I'm using OpenVPN to tie routers running OpenWRT (Linux), routers running FreeBSD, and workstations/laptops running Windows, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X together. It works flawlessly.

If you have to choose between a solid platform that costs $300 (and already has a stable of games available) and a brand-new system that is two hundred bucks more with far fewer games, which one do you think most people will buy?

The one with Linux on it, obviously!

In all seriousness, that was a big factor in my personal decision to buy the - WRT54G wireless router
- NSLU2 storage server
- TiVo
- XBox (original)