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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: 5, Insightful) by bobthecimmerian on Friday April 13 2018, @06:22PM (1 child)
Despite the fun of 20 years ago, and a couple re-flashed plastic routers since that, I realized in late 2015 that my time and energy is worth something and have not regretted just buying a good off the shelf router to save myself a lot of time and energy.
I work in tech, and would bet that you do too. My experience is similar - I play with technology these days, but not as much as I did in 2000 or even 2010. However, all that time I spent trying different things with networking, Linux installations, hosting my own services, and so forth paid off many times over in my career. I have a lot of colleagues that are bright, friendly, professional, and highly skilled at their primary role but have no idea how to proceed when DNS goes down, or they need to securely move files around a network, or they have to setup a virtual machine, and so forth. We work at a similar pace on our primary jobs but for all sorts of ancillary tasks I'm ten times faster because I was such a tinkerer.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Saturday April 14 2018, @02:38PM
I totally relate to that. In my career, wherever I have been, I have been the, or one of the 'go to' guys for answers to the questions nobody else can answer. Why? Just because I always study. Read. Keep up with what is going on in the industry. Experiment. And tinker.
Buying an off the shelf router does not mean that I don't still tinker. But I already paid my dues tinkering together a router and NAT a long time ago. Back when you couldn't buy it (affordably, for consumers) off the shelf.
One of my former bosses called it 'being a lifelong learner'. Even now in a big organization, I have the attention of bosses up to a senior VP. Back in 2014, my boss's boss's boss was visiting my office location. He came in to my office, handed me a boxed Raspberry Pi 1, and said "do something cool with this and let me know what you do". My jaw just about hit the floor.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.