Linux Router?

D

Decker87

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 24, 2005
Messages
415
Hi. I have heard several times on this forum that you can create your own wireless router using linux on an old machine.

Can any of you link me to some guides to do so?
 
pfsense is a more powerful one and is based off moonwall.

smoothwall is a more commonly used one

ipcop has plenty of great 3rd party add-ons.
 
There are quite a few of them out there....I've tried many of them.

To quickly sum up...I'll separate them into 3x categories.

The distros that basically act as just a NAT router...yes more features such as VPN, ability to create additional "zones" and a few more features than just your run of the mill home-grade router. These distros will run on older hardware. Ones such as pfsense, m0n0wall, smoothwall, IPCop by itself.

And distros that do even more features, full bore "edge appliances" that do the above..plus some features that make them "UTM appliances"...Unified Threat Management. The will scan traffic for viruses, malware, adware/spyware, remove SPAM from all e-mail traffic. Transparent Proxy features...you don't usually have to reconfigure your software to benefit from it. These are the distros that I really like, these features make these distros stand above the regular linux distro crowd. Because of the horsepower required to perform these extra scanning features, you need to install them on hardware that is somewhat modest in power, mid-range to upper Pentium 3's and higher, and strive for 512 megs of RAM to start with. IPCop with the Copfilter add-on, Endian, and a somewhat new arrival to the crowd....Untangle.

A 3rd category...one that comes to mind is a sort of open source alternative for Microsoft Small Business Server...Clark Connect. Firewall plus "business server" features such as file storage, e-mail, remote access, etc.
 
pfsense all the way!

i have set up many of these for paying clients, and they are as solid as can be. one client (a hotel) even uses it to handle the 'captive portal' for his wireless, which makes customers view a page that we created before they access the internet.

pfsense has a lot of the features that the previous posted mentioned as well (transparent proxy, etc etc), but my favorite one is the ability to cluster with 1 or more other local pfsnese boxes for full failover redundancy. you can also have as many itnerfaces as you have PCI slots to support, with as many IPs and vlans per interface as you care to configure (this is what drove me away from smoothwall (at the time) which would not do basic things such as multi IP on WAN, and snmp).
 
bigty said:
Interesting package how is that distro working out for you? I does look a bit heavy on resorces though (about the same as Clark Connect).
Click to expand...

I never got it to install just yet. I was getting an error on my install, so I'll have to document that and find out what it is going on.
 
I just downloaded it myself I will give it a go tomorrow.It does look to be a newer distro.
 
bigty said:
I just downloaded it myself I will give it a go tomorrow.It does look to be a newer distro.
Click to expand...

Please let me know how it goes. I made a thread on it, so hopefully we can get lots of people to contribute on this distro.
 
pfsense has a package system that allows you to easily add a lot those features and more. They are downloaded and installed completely from the web interface. All packages are generally 2 clicks to install.
 
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