It's time to build your own router
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
Ah ipchains. Those were the days.
It's been an interesting decade.
In retrospect, I was very fortunate to have access to not only one but two computers, dial-up Internet, and a second phone line. It didn't seem like it at the time because my friends were getting ISDN lines. So many hours spent on IRC learning about Linux...
_raises hand_
In my case, I had my existing desktop PC and acquired another (used) one. Broadband hadn't yet made it to the rural area I lived and I got tired of moving the phone line back and forth between the two PCs.
I was able to find a pair of (very well supported) 3c509s and a crossover cable and managed to build my first network and get both machines online at the same time.
20+ years later, I'm still doing pretty much the same thing, progressing from ipfwadm to ipchains to iptables (on Linux) to pf (on OpenBSD). And, of course, the little dedicated machine flinging my packets nowadays is much faster than I could have ever imagined back then.
It's nice to remember and realize how stable and performant things are these days.
The Macs of those days had RAM Disk support in the ROM so I copied the whole OS onto a RAM disk and unplugged the SCSI drive when it rebooted to create a nice solid-state router.
At the time, they were running out of ip addresses because every desktop was allocated a public ip.
Oh the tinkering.
56k POTS, IPChains, Them dodgy Intel NIC's, ADSL PPPoE, IPTables, Bonding, 802.1q VLANs, DSCP tc classes, Squid, Bind, MRTG, Cacti, IMQ Ingress Shaping kernel patch, Radius, Sendmail. I could go on for hours.
You break it? You fix it! Best self-schooling I'd ever had.
If you've never tried to "make buildworld" on FreeBSD on a Pentium 75, you can try it next time you have a spare couple days.
I assigned IP addresses, installed the Microsoft Internet Connection Sharing Service and called it a day :)
/me retracts the hand and runs away from flying rocks
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.
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...
Edit: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unifi... is a pretty great review, though.
Great article: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unifi...
- we use a Unifi AP Pro at work, and it has been superbly reliable (no weird connection dropouts or resets, unlike various expensive consumer routers we previously tried).
- you need the Controller software installed somewhere permanent (it contains a db of configuration settings for the APs). On Windows the software has an ugly dependency upon Java (ouch) and I couldn't quickly get it to run on Windows 7 (wouldn't start) or Windows 10 (crashed) so ended up installing it on OSX.
- you need your own router (they are only an AP).
Just a small correction: you don't need the controller software running permanently. Unless you're running a paid hotspot, you only need it for changing configuration or performing firmware updates. Once the configuration is applied to the APs, they retain it in flash and you can shut down the controller until next time.
It may help in noisy neighborhood, though your post sounds like you may not be aware that WiFi channels partially overlap. Which they do, see Wikipedia or something for details if unsure.
I was a bit turned off by how they yanked the pfsense-tools repository and then put in some restrictions on access to it.
(Jim: There's no need to reply and have the same conversation yet again. I'm well aware of what your reasons for doing so were and you are well within your rights to do it; we don't have to agree with it or like it, though.)
* And yes, the Asus has silicon dedicated to networking features, but so does the C2358.
The official builds support installation on disk partition just like any other Linux distribution.
For example: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fanless-i5-Mini-PC-Windows-Ba...
I initally looked on Amazon and found the fitlet-i, which is nice for a 4.5w TDP AMD box..
http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/specifications/fitlet-mod...
.. but these aliexpress deals are far better, and easily 3x faster if you can afford the 15w TDP budget.
Has anyone tested this? It makes intuitive sense, but things are often surprising in the performance/optimization world.
There are going to be, however, many people out there throttling 10k simultaneous connections from the same host, while they wouldn't bat an eye for 20k simultaneous connections coming from 2k different hosts in total.
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.
How about standard memory and accessory slots for starters. Something I can upgrade when I want faster network.
Two reasons: i could not hit the price point of a off-the-shelf-solution and I was worried about energy efficiency.
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.
Here's the rub: I have more devices than the normal person:
- 1x home-built NAS, via ethernet
- 1x desktop, via ethernet
- 1x laptop, again via wifi
- 1x mobile phone, via wifi
Could the outages be due to having an under-powered router? Are there any simple tests I could run to diagnose the problem further?
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 per se.
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?
FWIW, four devices might be slight more than a normal single person has, but it's definitely less than an average modern family reasonably has: 1 smartphone + 1 tablet per person, a smart TV (and/or AppleTV/Chromecast/Fire), a Sonos or two, a couple of laptops etc, plus whatever guests bring along.
A device may still work most of the time, but the analog electronics that implement the Boolean logic your digital device depends on are running outside design-spec, and the probability of a transient failure is increased.
One can further fantasize of secondary effects for example caused by unclean voltage rails due to bad filtering on switching regulators, perhaps increasing the probability of transistors latching up, frying controllers, or directly injecting strong noise typically in the 100kHz range into IO devices fucking with touchscreens, Ethernet, WiFi, you name it.
Take all of this with a grain of salt, I'm merely a university dropout struggling to make my boss understand why the 100's of decade old kiosks I service for a living don't work good like they used to.
Edit: Apparently my mind-dump above merely scratches the surface.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_electronic_compon...
First thing's first, your router's firmware is probably total shit. Flash DD-WRT or Tomato onto it if you can.
If you want to really nail the problem down you can buy a router based on the processor and memory specs and flash the firmware or go the route from the article.
Again, because most people have no idea how bad it really is, your router's firmware is probably absolute trash. It isn't an Asus is it?
That was my first thought as well, but no such luck...
It's a Netgear CG3700B, an EU DOCSIS model.
EDIT: actually, I may have been wrong about DD-WRT (https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Netgear_WNDR3700). What's the relationship between the WNDR3700 and the CG3700B, I wonder... they certainly look the same, so I'm hoping that A) mine is the EU version of the above router and B) it uses a compatible firmware.
You have 2 options to improve performance -
1. Use a third party DOCSIS modem, if allowed by your ISP, along with a seperate, dedicated router.
2. Put the modem/router abomination into gateway mode, and get yourself a seperate router. If the modem does not have a gateway mode, you can often use PPPoE to bypass the modems routing function.
This often resolves the connectivity issues introduced by these devices.
OP used Ubiquiti APs, directly managed from the homebrew router. Seems a sensible solution.
They generally use the same cards, it's having proper antennas that makes the most difference.
I live in an older apartment complex which was build in early 70s and there is only very poor copper connection, so I can get at most 8Mbs in through that. Slow speeds have forced me to look for alternative solutions and 4G LTE is the way to go here, it costs just shy of twice my old setup, but I get 80-100Mbs in and out, which is 10 times as fast, but being on 4G means I can need my router/modem/thing to be 4G enabled and while my main PC is connected to that router via Ethernet most of my devices use WLAN (things like chromecasts, phones, tables, and laptops).
Maybe I'm in very tiny minority here, but just saying things aren't always as simple.
[0]: http://www.balticnetworks.com/maxxwave-routermaxx-6-port-gig...
[1]: http://www.aerohive.com/products/access-points/ap330.html
So the only product is a combination router+wifiAP. Or the only way to have a stateful firewall in ipv6 is to have stateful firewall+NAT like in ipv4.
Its generally pretty easy to buy a stand alone WAP and configure it to be a very simple bridge to the existing network and call it done.
If you have kids, buy two, connect the kids devices to the second AP, and control its power via various methods (timer, home automation, whatever). This is a trivial way to enforce "homework first, toys like ipad second", or enforced bedtimes or whatever.
Note that this kind of misconception is limited solely to the networking world. The fact that TV+VCR combo devices exist made no one think its impossible to have stand alone TV and stand alone VCR.
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.
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...
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?
What about if I set it up to have the VPN only for torrents, for example?
Newer processors will have hardware to do AES, you can look it up on ark.intel.com where it is called Intel AES New Instructions. You probably want this on a slower processor such as a Celeron if you're planning to do OpenVPN.
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.
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)
You'd configure the switch port that the router is plugged into as a trunk, and then configure the other 4 switch ports as untagged in different VLANs (say, 101 for port 1, 102 for port 2, and so on).
On the router side, you can use vconfig to create VLAN subinterfaces for each VLAN. You'd end up with eth0.101, eth0.102, and so on.
You then just ignore eth0 on the router, and use eth0.# interfaces as stand-ins for the various switch ports. You can put them in Linux bridges, route to and from them, and so on.
This is internally how most cheap wireless routers work. The CPU has only 1 or 2 ethernet interfaces, and an small onboard switch chip.
Link level things like LLDP and STP may or may not work right with this config, depending on exactly how the switch chip (on board on a cheap wireless router, in the netgear switch for this DIY version). But most home and small business routers don't support LLDP and STP anyway.