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Tyler of tjll.net writes in his blog:
After my Asus N66U kicked the bucket, I considered a few options: another all-in-one router, upgrade to something like an EdgeRouter, or brew something custom. When I read the Ars Technica article espousing the virtues of building your own router, that pretty much settled it: DIY it is.
I've got somewhat of a psychological complex when it comes to rolling my own over-engineered solutions, but I did set some general goals: the end result should be cheap, low-power, well-supported by Linux, and extensible. Incidentally, ARM boards fit many of these requirements, and some like the Raspberry Pi have stirred up so much community activity that there's great support for the ARM platform, even though it may feel foreign from x86.
I've managed to cobble together a device that is not only dirt cheap for what it does, but is extremely capable in its own right. If you have any interest in building your own home router, I'll demonstrate here that doing so is not only feasible, but relatively easy to do and offers a huge amount of utility - from traffic shaping, to netflow monitoring, to dynamic DNS.
I built it using the espressobin, Arch Linux Arm, and Shorewall.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MadTinfoilHatter on Friday April 13 2018, @02:05PM (2 children)
I did use a RPi as a router/firewall/light server for a couple of years, and it kinda, sorta worked until the SD card died. It's not something I'd really recommend, though. Everything was fine when just using the web, but the internal net was painfully slow. It would also crash on average once every two months or so for no apparent reason. What would I recommend? Well, I'd recommend what I'm using now: A PC-Engines box [pcengines.ch] with an AMD Jaguar processor, 3 Intel network cards (so you get WAN, LAN and DMZ). Runs pfsense lika a champ (or Linux if you prefer) and it's far more stable than the RPi. In fact the only time it went down without me shutting it off was when we had a blackout. It will set you back more than $50, though. If you want the full case + WiFi + storage package, you should be prepared to fork over about $200. Totally worth it in my opinion.
(Score: 2) by KilroySmith on Friday April 13 2018, @05:00PM
Thanks for that link to PCEngines. I needed a small, low-power board and they look perfect - and reasonably priced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 13 2018, @07:00PM
On raspi, it is critical not to write frequently to the sd card. Hack a bit to make a read only operating environment.