Home router hardware.

[th0ni]

Hello Debians,

I'm looking to make a home router with four ethernet ports and WiFi for my home LAN, any suggestions on the hardware?

Regards,
+h0n1

[arzgi]

I have not seen many with different specs, wifi & 4 etherernet ports

All that I've owned have worked fine. Zyxel had recent security flaw, but released update.

[milomak]

how are you currently connecting to the internet?

[NFT5]

make a home router with four ethernet ports and WiFi for my home LAN, any suggestions on the hardware?

Raspberry Pi, (or equivalent) with a network switch - 4 or 5 ports.

Depending on the model you choose, most have WiFi already.

[th0ni]

Maybe I was a *bit dry*.

I am connected to the internet via ADSL. I need a port for my laptop and IP phone. Mobiles and tablets connected via WiFi. One port for my TV and another port for my PABX. Another port to connect to the modem. I need to control the bandwidth for the TV and PABX.

I need a device which can take Debian to do all the settings myself.

If Raspberry pie have something like this, it would be great.

Regards,
th0n1

[pylkko]

While you certainly can use a rpi and Debian (or Raspbian), there are reasons why this may not be the best solution. Basically a router is just a computer and often the software the company producing it often is a linux OS and many of these commercial router boards have processors and ram that are way less than a Raspberry pi.

However, most of these boards designed to work networking have special hardware acceleration for traffic. It's basically similar to how a desktop computer can have a dedicated GPU for doing graphics, but it is some chip-set that offloads the network transfers from the main CPU. In addition, standard Debian does not run a RT kernel. So, you might expect some increased latency or other issues. Another thing is that while you can use Debian to make a router, there are already existing linux-based projects for router software (such as https://dd-wrt.com/ or http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato) which the community has been optimizing for router use and which usually have things like quality-of-service settings to adjust what thing on your network gets how much of the bandwidth at what time etc. In additiob, the RPi does not have external antennas, so the range is going to be low.

Because there are thousands of RPi-like boards out there, it might make sense to look for one that is more suitable for working as a router and which is known to run these open source linux firmwares. Of couse, a general purpose board like RPI can be more easily repurposed if one day you longer need the set-up that you are building now...

I have no idea what boards to suggest, but maybe start by searching http://linuxgizmos.com/ or asking on dd-wrt forums

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I've recently bought a TP-Link Archer C7, that is compatible with OpenWRT and it's very good.

Or perhaps try something like a PC Engines board — the APU2 will even run OpenBSD if you can find one of their older wle200nx PCIe wireless cards, that Atheros AR9280 chip is supported by athn(4).

[shep]

OpenWrt is an active project that provides a wide range of router firmware. Unlike DD-wrt, they refuse to sign NDA's with Broadcom. Their Qualcomm, Mediatek and ARM based routers use more recent Linux Kernels. DD-wrt is a better choice if you are using Broadcom based devices.

https://forum.openwrt.org/

https://openwrt.org

The ARM based routers are power houses compared to SOHO routers you buy off the self. The Banana Pi BPI R64 is Mediatek based and has 4 LAN ports.
https://liliputing.com/2019/08/build-your-own-router-with-a-68-banana-pi-bpi-r64-board.html

[pylkko]

I suppose another thing to look at might be - depending on your insterestests and values - how much the firmware for the board is open. Because may ARM dev boards, including the raspberry pi use closed source proprietary. For example, you can run Open WRT on RPi
https://openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_fo ... spberry_pi

However, you cannot so much as boot the device without proprietary blobs (unless you bare metal on the GPU) as far as I know. Also, most countries require modems to use closed source firmware by default. For some people these might be an issue

I think this really opens up a interesting question, for which the might be an answer, but which perhaps is not known widely. And this question is: what if you want to make a D.I.Y router which nevertheless uses hardware accelerated encryption and networking and you want to run in as far as possible on software that is open, auditable and that you can tune how you want... then what are the options? Now that MIPS is an open ISA, is it better than ARM boards? I tried to look at the options and search on the internet about this topic, but at least yet I have not been able to formulate a clear answer to this question.

I did find this about LibreRouter

https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/01/29 ... -networks/