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DIY router

lavablade02
By lavablade02
in Networking
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I found this article from ars technica about building a DIY router. I was wondering about a few things: What hardware should I look for? Can I turn this into a home storage system? Is it worth it? And how hard is it

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a core 2 duo would be overkill for a router, you should be able to combine them.

this is using a different but more common software for routers.

 

 

Good luck, Have fun, Build PC, and have a last gen console for use once a year. I should answer most of the time between 9 to 3 PST

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2 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

a core 2 duo would be overkill for a router, you should be able to combine them.

this is using a different but more common software for routers.

 

 

Haven't added any networking hardware to this yet, but does this look good?

i5-8600k, MSI Z370-A Pro, 2x 8GB DDR4-3k, MSI Gaming X 1060, NZXT S340, 2TB HDD, 750w Corsair PSU, AOC 2775 OC'd to 80Hz and CFG73 at 144hz

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Check out my monitor overclocking guide

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Just now, lavablade02 said:

Haven't added any networking hardware to this yet, but does this look good?

get a used optiplex or something similar for 20$ not for 300

Good luck, Have fun, Build PC, and have a last gen console for use once a year. I should answer most of the time between 9 to 3 PST

NightHawk 3.0: R7 5700x @, B550A vision D, H105, 2x32gb Oloy 3600, Sapphire RX 6700XT  Nitro+, Corsair RM750X, 500 gb 850 evo, 2tb rocket and 5tb Toshiba x300, 2x 6TB WD Black W10 all in a 750D airflow.
GF PC: (nighthawk 2.0): R7 2700x, B450m vision D, 4x8gb Geli 2933, Strix GTX970, CX650M RGB, Obsidian 350D

Skunkworks: R5 3500U, 16gb, 500gb Adata XPG 6000 lite, Vega 8. HP probook G455R G6 Ubuntu 20. LTS

Condor (MC server): 6600K, z170m plus, 16gb corsair vengeance LPX, samsung 750 evo, EVGA BR 450.

Spirt  (NAS) ASUS Z9PR-D12, 2x E5 2620V2, 8x4gb, 24 3tb HDD. F80 800gb cache, trueNAS, 2x12disk raid Z3 stripped

PSU Tier List      Motherboard Tier List     SSD Tier List     How to get PC parts cheap    HP probook 445R G6 review

 

"Stupidity is like trying to find a limit of a constant. You are never truly smart in something, just less stupid."

Camera Gear: X-S10, 16-80 F4, 60D, 24-105 F4, 50mm F1.4, Helios44-m, 2 Cos-11D lavs

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2 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

get a used optiplex or something similar for 20$ not for 300

will an optiplex work? I know plenty of people with old computers I can probably get for free, or close to it. I was also wanting to turn it into a place to backup the drives.

i5-8600k, MSI Z370-A Pro, 2x 8GB DDR4-3k, MSI Gaming X 1060, NZXT S340, 2TB HDD, 750w Corsair PSU, AOC 2775 OC'd to 80Hz and CFG73 at 144hz

Comic sans is the worst font

Check out my monitor overclocking guide

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1 minute ago, lavablade02 said:

will an optiplex work? I know plenty of people with old computers I can probably get for free, or close to it. I was also wanting to turn it into a place to backup the drives.

yep. you can fit 3-4 3.5in drives even a micro desktop. just add a multiport gig nic.  

Good luck, Have fun, Build PC, and have a last gen console for use once a year. I should answer most of the time between 9 to 3 PST

NightHawk 3.0: R7 5700x @, B550A vision D, H105, 2x32gb Oloy 3600, Sapphire RX 6700XT  Nitro+, Corsair RM750X, 500 gb 850 evo, 2tb rocket and 5tb Toshiba x300, 2x 6TB WD Black W10 all in a 750D airflow.
GF PC: (nighthawk 2.0): R7 2700x, B450m vision D, 4x8gb Geli 2933, Strix GTX970, CX650M RGB, Obsidian 350D

Skunkworks: R5 3500U, 16gb, 500gb Adata XPG 6000 lite, Vega 8. HP probook G455R G6 Ubuntu 20. LTS

Condor (MC server): 6600K, z170m plus, 16gb corsair vengeance LPX, samsung 750 evo, EVGA BR 450.

Spirt  (NAS) ASUS Z9PR-D12, 2x E5 2620V2, 8x4gb, 24 3tb HDD. F80 800gb cache, trueNAS, 2x12disk raid Z3 stripped

PSU Tier List      Motherboard Tier List     SSD Tier List     How to get PC parts cheap    HP probook 445R G6 review

 

"Stupidity is like trying to find a limit of a constant. You are never truly smart in something, just less stupid."

Camera Gear: X-S10, 16-80 F4, 60D, 24-105 F4, 50mm F1.4, Helios44-m, 2 Cos-11D lavs

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I am using a old atom n270 itx mainborad as a router , a pci 32bit GE card as wan interface and onboard GB nic as LAN

2gb of ddr2 ram and a 4 CF card convert to sata as os 

This toy I ran over 3yrs with out any problem , the downtime is only for upgrade the os firmware 

It also has dhcp server and a ips firewall

 

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It can also be critical to consider power consumption vs you're actual use cases.  A typical 802.11ac router consumes around 10 watts out the wall.  That's pretty low.  If you're going to use an old PC you could increase your power consumption ten fold easily.  Even compact NUC like devices would still consume a fair bit more.

 

So then with that power consumption considdered, also against the initial investment costs of a low powered x86 option like a NUC or the like, do you actually NEED this for your use case or do you just think it'd be 'neat'?

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On 5/11/2018 at 12:28 PM, lavablade02 said:

will an optiplex work? I know plenty of people with old computers I can probably get for free, or close to it. I was also wanting to turn it into a place to backup the drives.

I would not try to build a nas and router into one pc. Get something cheap and simple and let that do nothing but pfsense. Make a separate freenas build.

 

Pfsense and freenas are both very simple to get going but are powerful and featurefull enough that you can always learn more and do more with them if you have the time and drive.

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Pfsense Build (Repurposed for plex) https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/715459-pfsense-build/

 

 

 

 

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Yeah, pfsense is extremely capable.. but also easy to use. It's almost (not quite but close) bridge between enterprise and home user. A small branch office could use PFSense in industry just fine.

 

Some of the fancy things it can do. Load balance and ssl offloading with relayd, fail over multi router, multi-wan. etc. For home use thats not so important but trust that the expand ability for you network is there. FreeBSD also has a very very fast network stack compared to most OS's so routing packets through the kernel isn't as big of a hit for it as with most OS's like Linux. (FreeBSD with modifications can do 100gb per second w/ ssl)

 

Edit: One gripe I do have is that FreeBSD uses an older version of PF. FreeBSD modified their version for SMP and OpenBSD changed the syntax of this since then so there is some divergence here and OpenBSD's version is slightly nicer (specially in the NAT rdr rules). Illumos is in the process of implementing PF so we'll see how that port comes along and it might make a very good new platform for PF (as Illumos has Crossbow). For PFSense itself it would be too much work probably to change. I don't know if anyone is exactly sure about it's future on FreeBSD. (Mac OS has this too but I'm unsure about the specifics there.. it is probably a freebsd port.)

"Only proprietary software vendors want proprietary software." - Dexter's Law

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I might have lost the perspective here.. But the article TS is showing is not using Pfsense. Rather a collection of linux server softwares. In theory Ars technoca just made a server for routing purposes. Not that it matters, alot of people use servers as routers (inkluding myself).

 

But my question is, what do you want to achive with this? Have you considered the cost of running a huge router like this? Do you have the skills required to operate it? And do you really have need for it?

 

One thing is sure, a router like this will quite easily pull 10x the power compared to the router you already have. It does not "automaticly" have WiFi. A bare metal router as they made in the article will require you to have linux server knowledge. Better is things like PFsense, IPfire and those. But the questions above still applies.

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