How to turn anything into a router

Posted by yabones 13 hours ago

How to turn anything into a router(nbailey.ca)

577 points | 207 commentspage 6

brcmthrowaway 9 hours ago|

Does routing on Linux have any hardware acceleration for IP packets?

pak9rabid 8 hours ago|

Yes. You can take advantage of Netfilter's flowtable infrastructure and if you have the right hardware (NVIDIA/Mellanox ConnectX-5 or MediaTekMT7621) it will actually offload the processing of these packets to the NIC hardware. This only applies to established connections, however, but that typically accounts for like 95% of the traffic passing through.

brcmthrowaway 6 hours ago||

Awesome. I wonder if packet processing can be GPU accelerated

eth0up 9 hours ago||

I'm currently running a Debian lite weight server on an old ml100 (onlogic) nuc. It's an old i3, with 16gb ram and no fan. But I have another. Anyone recommend a solid router setup on one of these ancient artifacts? Presently using openwrt on a proper router, though if the nuc is capable, I'd dedicate it thusly.

nadav_tal 10 hours ago||

Seeing an old T60 with an ExpressCard-PCIe bridge used as a router is a great look. It's a solid reminder that even a "trash-picked" 18-year-old machine has way more CPU than you actually need for a home gigabit line. The mention of the serial console (ttyS0) is the real pro-tip in this guide. If you're running a headless box in a closet, a serial getty is a lifesaver for the moment you inevitably misconfigure a firewall rule and lock yourself out of SSH. Sticking to a minimal Debian base with nftables is often much cleaner than using OPNsense/pfSense; there's no GUI abstraction layer hiding what's actually happening to your packets.

Pxtl 10 hours ago||

I'm curious - for power consumption, considering that you can get RaspPi products for so cheaply, is a discarded laptop more or less impactful on your electrical bill than a RaspPi?

Like is the "free" laptop going to cost you more in the long-run then a nice little power-sipping ARM like a Pi5? Or do you need those extra operations-per-second that the more power-hungry x86 CPU gets you?

b112 12 hours ago||

This will certainly work, but the whole mesh networking and more advanced aspects of a real wifi router won't really be present.

I get by without it, but I can imagine some won't be able to.

JohnFen 12 hours ago|

If you're tech-savvy and building your own router, you can add those advanced aspects in if you want them.

I'd be willing to bet, though, that the overwhelming majority of people who use consumer routers aren't doing anything remotely advanced. A how-to that covers the majority of use cases is valuable even when it excludes advanced use cases.

Tostino 12 hours ago||

There are a whole lot of normal people using mesh networking Wi-Fi routers. Honestly, most of the least technical people that I know are all using mesh networks because their houses require it.

JohnFen 12 hours ago||

Certainly. But it's still a minority use case.

Perhaps someone else will (or did) write up a how-to for support mesh networking in your homebrew router.

fragmede 10 hours ago|||

Where do you live to consider mesh networking a minority use case? I live in a small city apartment so I don't need one, but everyone I know outside of the city needs at least two nodes to cover their houses.

JohnFen 6 hours ago||

I was looking at various stats and surveys, not going by my personal experience. But if you're asking about my personal experience, I haven't seen any consumer use of it at all, only enterprise and institutional use. That's part of why I wasn't going by by my own experience, because I know that the use isn't zero.

I don't live in a densely populated city.

Hikikomori 11 hours ago|||

Home mesh is mostly about having wireless backhaul, and you can certainly do that if you have (preferably) two radios, you just set up one radio as a client to your main AP.

Even if you aren't doing wireless backhaul you just rely on regular client behaviour to transition between APs, can enable 802.11r to improve this.

Enterprise "mesh" typically uses wired backhaul for performance and can help clients roam quicker with a controller (auth, not deciding to roam). Controller can also adjusts radio power so APs aren't talking over each other if they're too close.

Mesh isn't any magic, just regular wifi.

tibbydudeza 8 hours ago||

Nobody I know makes routers and more importantly WiFi combo AP in the US except for high end corporate stuff - even the US only cable modem stuff from Comcast are Chinese OEM ???.

Some more idiocy from the FCC chair.

topspin 7 hours ago|

SpaceX manufactures network gear (Starlink satellite internet terminals) in the US. Bastrop, Texas, specifically. Those phased array transceivers, with heaters, ethernet, GPS and WiFi are way more difficult to make than the typical indoor WiFi router.

DesiLurker 10 hours ago||

is this the new age .. how to run doom on it?

SamDc73 6 hours ago||

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YouAreWRONGtoo 10 hours ago||

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hoechst 10 hours ago|

tl;dr:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE