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Benefits of a Homebrew Router (arstechnica.com)
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.