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Benefits of a Homebrew Router (arstechnica.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the good-for-confusing-comcast-techs dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Jim Salter has posted an article explaining why it can be a good idea to build your own router, and how he put his together. Quoting: "In the consumer world, routers mostly have itty-bitty little MIPS CPUs under the hood without a whole lot of RAM (to put it mildly). These routers largely differentiate themselves from one another based on the interface: How shiny is it? ... I wanted to go a different route. A lot of interesting and reasonably inexpensive little x86-64 fanless machines have started showing up on the market lately. The trick for building a router is finding one with multiple NICs." Once assembled, the homebrew router blows away even high-end SOHO routers for throughput and performance. "Given that nobody's offering any Internet connections over 200mbps in my area yet, that makes my inner crypto nerd dance with glee. I could literally encrypt every single byte of my Internet traffic, in either direction, without a performance penalty." Of course, it won't do wireless, but you can get separate wireless access points to handle that.

7 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. raspberry pi about 50$ does just fine. by anon+mouse-cow-aard · · Score: 5, Informative

    raspberry pi, usb ethernet dongle, power supply... about 40$. does 30 mbps with full iptables, NAT, dual stack ipv4 and ipv6, speed test is 30 mbps flat out. my isp rate is 30 mbps ... If you have access to > 100mbps great, but outside of google cities isn't that kind of rare? Don't see the point of a 300$ homebrew router. been using a pi for years. have two spares. no moving parts, no fan, low power consumption...

    1. Re:raspberry pi about 50$ does just fine. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      100Mbps at home isn't that rare if you don't live in some backwater country.

    2. Re: raspberry pi about 50$ does just fine. by DuckDodgers · · Score: 3, Informative

      yeah, me too

    3. Re:raspberry pi about 50$ does just fine. by 110010001000 · · Score: 1, Informative

      I live in the US and have had 300Mbps for years, uncapped. Not sure what backwater you live in.

  2. EdgeRouter is exactly this! by UberLord · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ubiqiti EdgeRouter is exactly this: dual core MIPS64 @ 1Ghz, 512Mb memory and a removable USB flash stick for storage.
    https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/e...
    This is ample for my needs. I bought the 3 port version about a year ago for £80.

    https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/en...

    As of today, NetBSD-current has an uptime of about 6 months - which is when I made the last kernel modifications to support the NPF firewall.
    This is more uptime than any other SOHO gear I have and the performance of the unit is exceptional.

  3. OpenWRT for $25 by GlobalEcho · · Score: 3, Informative

    These guys sell a tiny "travel router" (or just the board if you like) that goes for $25 on Amazon. Crucially it has 2 ethernet ports (albeit only 100Mbits), along with Wifi. It ships with their modified version of OpenWRT but takes only a couple minutes to flash to the latest fully open-source version. From there, going further into homebrew is trivially easy. I find it a better starting point than a raw Linux distro, and the low power consumption just cannot be beat. If you want to go Linux and don't have a fat pipe, I recommend it.

  4. refurb Cisco Liquid-8 by raymorris · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't pay any attention to fanless, but refurb Cisco and other high-end gear can often be had for a song.
    Liquid-8 Technology has some deals. http://stores.ebay.com/Liquid-...