Mastodawn

How to turn anything into a router

I don’t like to cover “current events” very much, but the American government just revealed a truly bewildering policy effectively banning import of new consumer router models. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but if this does indeed come to pass it may be beneficial to learn how to “homebrew” a router. Fortunately, you can make a router out of basically anything resembling a computer. I’ve used a linux powered mini-pc as my own router for many years, and have posted a few times before about how to make linux routers and firewalls in that time.

Noah Bailey

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bluedino Mar 30

This really takes me back. My first actual 'use' for Linux was making routers out of leftover computers.

The perfect machine back then was a 100MHz Pentium, in a slimline desktop case. At the time, the Pentium III was the current desktop chip, so you'd have a pile of early Pentium-class machines to use. And even a 10mb ISA network card (3Com if possible) would have plenty of power for the internet connections of the day. But 100mb PCI cards were still fairly cheap.

Install two NICs, load your favorite Linux distro, and then follow the IP-Masquerading HOWTO and you've got internet access for the whole apartment building, office, or LAN party.

Eventually I moved on to Linux Firewalls by Robert Ziegler for a base to build on.

After that I started piling other services on, like a spam filter, Squid cache, it was amazing to get so much use out of hardware that was going to just get thrown out.

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razingeden

That takes me back, I had the same trajectory , getting a newspaper’s news room and offices online with a single computer sharing its ISDN connection. Think ours was also a 100mhz gateway 2000 computer or some such.

That snowballed into “we want a website do you know how to do that?” and. Well, no, but it had Apache available and I … figured things out enough to take the skills elsewhere.

Repeated the same trick with a place in Wisconsin, who initially shared a 56k dialup connection with all their dispatchers and were impressed the thing had stayed up for 900 days without even redialing. 90% of their work was done in an on-prem wyse terminal anyway, dialup used to do the job for email or googling an address.

27, 28 years later I’m still dragged in front of them once in a while to ask how they can accomplish something cheaply with Linux, bubble gum, paper clips, or whatever . The times and technology have changed, but not how cheap they are!