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Home and small-office routers is a hot target for security audits. Vulnerabilities and poor security practices is becoming the rule, rather than the exception. Researchers from Universidad Europea de Madrid found 60 distinct flaws in 22 devices. Full details of their research can be read in the Full Disclosure mailing list. Affected brands include D-Link, Belkin, Linksys, Huawei, and others. Among the flaws are at least one backdoor with a hard-coded password. Several routers allow external attackers to delete files on USB storage devices, and others facilitate DDoS attacks. About half of the flaws involve Cross Site Scripting and Cross Site Request Forgery capabilities
Summary: COTS Embedded devices don't have security you can rely on, but why is that so? OpenWRT may be an alternative.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Friday June 05 2015, @02:35AM
That's what I've done with an old, old netbook that's really useless nowadays. Install hostapd, get a USB wi-fi adapter which supports Master mode (or if your internal wireless card supports it natively, then great!) and install hostapd, dnsmasq, and you're good to go. This gives you a lot of flexibility:
This is the tutorial I followed: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Home_Router [gentoo.org] - you could also build with with a Raspberry Pi or other cheap commodity machine.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Friday June 05 2015, @02:39AM
In fact, I can't stop thinking of more features this gives you that you:
and on, and on, and on...
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday June 05 2015, @03:35AM
How is that better than an inexpensive router with openwrt?
The router at least will have 4 port gigabit switch built in, is more compact, requires less tinkering, and is easier to replace when it fails.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 05 2015, @01:07PM
And when the wireless standards progress and you need to upgrade. The upgrade procedure requires digital Houdini art and the wireless stuff is not possible to upgrade. There's usually a requirement for special architecture and weird drivers too. Hardware upgrades are essentially impossible.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday June 05 2015, @03:28PM
So what? An entire new inexpensive router costs the same as a wireless usb adapter.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Saturday June 06 2015, @12:19AM
For one, you're basically guaranteed compatibility and have a broad range of choice in the hardware you use. If you buy a packaged router, you're basically locked into the firmware and hardware it provides.
As for the ethernet ports, you could always attach a switch/hub and again, you have the option of upgrading that any time you like, plus you can repurpose any of the hardware you want to use, or even the whole machine itself.
And you can do all of this for 50-100 USD. Too lazy to search myself right now, but I'm guessing that this is pretty competitive with the price of a standard, off-the-shelf OpenWRT router.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Saturday June 06 2015, @04:54AM
As for the ethernet ports, you could always attach a switch/hub and again
+
And you can do all of this for 50-100 USD. Too lazy to search myself right now, but I'm guessing that this is pretty competitive with the price of a standard, off-the-shelf OpenWRT router.
Yes it is. And then you need to add a switch to get ethernet ports. So instead of a neat little compact box for that price, you have an old netbook with a usb wifi adapter sticking out of it, plugged into a switch...
If you buy a packaged router, you're basically locked into the firmware and hardware it provides.
As for hardware, ditto with a netbook. Not really a lot of replaceable parts on most. Yes you get a usb port... but as I said previously upgrading the wifi by means of a new usb wireless adapter costs as much as a new router.
And as for firmware... we're talking about OpenWRT. so your not really that locked in.
Don't get me wrong; I agree your solution will work... i just don't see it as being any real advantage. I suppose if you already HAVE a netbook and switch to use... AND you don't have a consumer router to flash openwrt onto... go nuts. But given the choice... I'd prefer a dedicated router. To each there own.
(Score: 1) by Nollij on Friday June 05 2015, @05:25AM
I thought we had moved past the days of needing to turn an old PC into a router. Most consumer models running Tomato/OpenWRT/etc will do everything the typical SN user needs. In fact, everything in your first post is fully supported by any of the cheap <$50 routers on the compatibility pages, and they're easier to setup.
If you need better subnet management, you almost certainly need enterprise-grade stuff, not a repurposed PC.
Full disclosure: I used to run Smoothwall on an old PC. This was ~10 years ago. I replaced it with a Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 05 2015, @01:10PM
Using old PC as router is efficient and flexible. And enterprise stuff usually comes with a price tag to match. Not fun when a transient fries your enterprise investment. With an old PC you can get a real operating system and thus do subnet management with a low price point.