GoKawiilI 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. It’s been rock solid stable, and the only issue I’ve had over the years was wearing out a $20 mSATA drive. While I use Debian typically, Alpine linux probably works just as well, perhaps better if you’re familiar with it. As long as the device runs Linux well and has a couple USB ports, you’re good to go. Mini-PCs, desktop PCs, SBCs, rackmount servers, old laptops, or purpose built devices will all work.
To be clear, this is not meant to be a practical “solution” to the US policy, it’s to show people a neat “hack” you can do to squeeze more capability out of hardware you might already own, and to demonstrate that there’s nothing special about routers - They’re all just computers after all.
Hardware selection
My personal preference is a purpose-made mini PC with a passively cooled design.
However, basically anything will work. It should have two Ethernet interfaces, but a standard USB-Ethernet dongle will also do the trick. It won’t be as reliable as an onboard interface, but will probably be good enough. For example, this janky pile of spare parts can easily push 820-850mbps on the wired LAN and ~300 mbps on the wireless network:
This particular device is a Celeron 3205U dual core running at a blistering 1.5 GHz. Even that measly chip is more than capable of routing an entire house or small business worth of traffic.
Going back even further, this was my setup for the first couple weeks of the fall 2016 semester:
It might be hard to tell what’s going on here by looking, so let me break it down:
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