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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.

9 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Homebrew used to be about doing better. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Homebrew used to be about doing better than what you could could get off-the-shelf.

    In this case it sounds like it's better in some small, useless way, while being far worse in so many others. Now he's got throughput he can't actually use, but is missing critical functionality like wireless support.

    I think this decline in the quality of homebrew reflects what has happened to the Linux community as a whole lately. The quality has dropped like a rock. So much Linux software has gotten worse. GNOME 3 looks awful. Systemd and PulseAudio still have caused me nothing but trouble. Firefox gets worse with each release. Wayland is nowhere to be found.

    We need to restore the glory of homebrew projects. We need our homebrew projects to be better than the commercial off-the-shelf offerings. We need to not build something that's slightly better, but also far worse. We need to build something that's better in every way.

    We need to restore the glory of homebrew projects!

    1. Re:Homebrew used to be about doing better. by LordKronos · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Now he's got throughput he can't actually use, but is missing critical functionality like wireless support.

      I personally gave up on wireless support in my router. First problem I was always having was finding a router that had all the features I want. DDWRT is a priority for me, but finding a single device that
      1) supports DDWRT easily (ie: doesn't rely on me finding a specific outdated revision of the hardware)
      2) is cheap
      3) has gigabit ethernet
      4) good wireless
      5) has a good amount of memory

      Getting all of these in one device is difficult. The next problem is that I'd periodically end up with wifi issues. I had issues now and then with different device. Then I got my OnePlus One and the problems got worse. For some reason that device always has connection issues. It would continually get disconnected (so often that I couldn't even backup the videos from my phone via smb...it would always lose connection in the middle and I'd have to start over. It might take 10 tries before a video successfully copied over). I tried 4 different DDWRT routers I had access to (4 different device models from 3 different brands) and had the same issues

      The last issue is dealing with power outages. All of my networking equipment is in the basement on a battery backup. When power goes down, I'm able to maintain connectivity and continue working from a laptop without issue. However, locating everything in the basement means I have OK signal on the first floor, and terrible to no signal on the 2nd floor and front/back porch. To resolve this issue I put a 2nd DDWRT device (running as a wireless access point) on the first floor, but unfortunately it has no battery backup.

      About a year ago, I decided to change my strategy. I ditched the 2nd device, turned off wireless on the router itself, and bought myself a Ubiquiti wireless access point. This solves a lot of issues
      1) Wireless is now one less feature I need to concern myself with on a router
      2) It's reliability has been impeccable. In 1 year, it has been rock solid, not requiring a single reset, and it's worked flawlessly (and performed well) with every device I connected it to
      3) It's designed to use power over ethernet. It's power supply is plugged in to the UPS in the basement, then the ethernet is patched between the powersupply and my patch panel and through the regular house networking.
      4) It looks really nice, so I can actually put it in a very central place in the house without it looking ugly. And at this location, the one device provides exceptional coverage for my entire house and the front/back yard.

  2. Re:raspberry pi about 50$ does just fine. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Our cable ISP just upgraded us to 150/20. I had an old desktop lying around, and power isn't *that* expensive here, so I bought a two-port intel NIC and tried to remember how routing and firewalls worked in FreeBSD. (I'm sure Linux or OpenBSD would be as good, it's just what I happen to know best). It took a few days to get everything working (e.g. getting dhcpd to register the dynamic hostnames with named, not to mention the strange new world of IPv6 delegations), but it was kind of fun.

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

    I live in a third world country, AKA the USA. Good luck getting 100Mbps, or with such a low cap that you would want to go to something 1/3 of the speed, just so you can watch more then a few HD movies a month.

  4. Re:raspberry pi about 50$ does just fine. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Quad Core RasPi, 1 Gb RAM : $35.00 - $25.00 on SALE
    Power Supply: Scavenged : FREE 5V @ 2A
    100Mbps USB NIC : $5.00
    Wireless b/g/n USB Dongle: $10.00
    USB Hard Drive @ 750Gb: $45.00
    8 Port unmanaged Switch: $15.00

    OpenWRT: FREE / DDWRT: FREE

    So, I have a router, a NAS, an FTP server, bittorrent, SSH Server, WEB Server, WiFiAP, TimeMachine, RSYNC, all running on a single box, with a power consumption of less than 10W under FULL LOAD.

    I've got 4 CPUs, 1 Gb of RAM, a 30Mbps/6Mbps uncapped network connection, a hatred of Comcast, and tons of legal torrents to seed, and the Pi is hardly breaking a sweat.

    Sure, it doesn't come in a nice pretty case, but I can replace individual failed components, and even upgrade.

  5. Re:net6501 by alantus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Overall I've had a positive experience with Soekris devices. However, let me tell you why I won't be buying any more of them:

    1. Cases badly designed for cooling. Unless you add a fan, you will have to put the case vertically in summer.

    2. Disregard for OS support/integration. These things are supposed to work on Linux and BSD, but when something goes wrong (ie: the device hangs) or the hardware doesn't work as well as it should, they just blame the OS and don't even investigate. They might offer an RMA if its under warranty, but the issues will continue for sure.

    3. As soon as their latest device comes out, support for the older ones stops. For example, they promised to add USB boot support for the net5501, but as soon as the net6501 came out, they just forgot about it.

    Other minor ones: closed BIOS and the price is not great.

  6. The Unifi USG ain't bad either by zerofoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For those of us who want quality, but don't want the hassle of complicated configs, the Unifi USG is pretty nice as well - and it's cheap.

    https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-swi...

    So far, I'm a big fan of what Ubiquiti is doing these days.

  7. Use case by silas_moeckel · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ok so you're going to fiddle with making your own firewall.

    You use a dedicated bit of hardware, $240 for a useless fixed config box. I can get a more powerfull laptop that is also silent and can run multiple VM's for the same to less. It also has a built in UPS and wifi that may be able to used as an AP a usb3 to gigabit dongle takes care of the second port.

    You install ubuntu and throw a few iptable rules in, because obviously years of getting to a sane default with pfsence etc means nothing.

    You still need a wifi AP and generally the standalone AP's cost more than a router.

    If you're doing this would assume you allready have a VM hosts in the house that you could just run pfsence on. I did this for a decade. You can get 40+ mbs of vpn traffic out of a high end wifi router. Mind you routers used to come with bits like the BCM5365P that could do 75 mbs in hardware (and that is an ancient 2005 ish chip).

    --
    No sir I dont like it.
  8. Re: net6501 by joao.cordeiro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Net6501 is crap. I have a 5501 and it was already crap. And here is why: It is largely overpriced. It has only 1 core and low frequency, and no special functions from good i5 or i7. Ram is always low for a x86. Every ethernet is its own device.. So, vlan and bridging happens on the kernel side AKA cpu. You can easly buy 2 or 3 arm based custom routers for its price, all 4 cores and all with switch chip with vlan support.