Built a new router.
Built a new router.
My router was getting a little flakey a year or so back just about the time a friend of mine was moving and he dumped his old dell on me because it was overheating on him and he wanted a new computer. I popped the side open (he wanted to keep the hard drive) without tools and pulled a tennis ball sized dust bunny out of the cpu heatsink and fan and its been running as my router happily ever since...happily except for the noise.
Anyways, I got kinda spoiled with running a full featured router even though I only have a modest home network...and the noise was killing me. So I bought an Intel Atom board and 2gb of ram for right about $100. I had an old SSD from my netbook..but it has a funky pin connection..so I was planning on frys having some sort of conversion plug for it but no dice...so I splurged and bought an 8gb mem stick for about $6. I did a full install of pfsense onto the stick..not a static hot boot. Its running fine and no spinning parts..so no noise. I guess my only worry is its writing to the log files all the time. Mem sticks have a life cycle of like 10k-100k writes..as mine was so cheap Im sure Im at the low end of that range. My current plan is to get another stick and mirror the drive and just swap and reboot when it craps out...wondering how long that will be...any thoughts?
I guess the only down side Ive seen so far with this route is the atom board only has 1 expansion slot...so I cant add more nics over time for a dmz or anything...not that I foresee the need anytime soon..
Also, I dont have a case for it..its just sitting on top of the anti static bag..on top of the box...might need to prettify it at some point.
This is part of my plan to use the money I would normally have spent on a new computer this cycle to upgrade other than the cpu...make my computer nicer if not faster. Moving my network over to small business grade hardware over consumer grade is one such upgrade.
How about a cheap unmanaged switch? That would work for wired. Also, what do you do for wireless?
I have a netgear 8 port switch. I have my old router plugged into the switch strickly for the wireless. It had a hard time handleing all my home traffic at once, but now it just handles my phone and seems to work fine.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856107095
I've been playing toying with the idea of getting one of these. It has a pci slot and it accepts a daughter board with an additional 4 10/100/1000 ports. I'm not sure if you can have both a pci card with the daughter board. :( The whole shebang would run roughly 400 bones is another barrier.
Im not sure. Thats the same processor mine has but different board..although it seems similar enough.
Anyways, its been running for a few weeks without any problems..still on the original mem stick. I did find a converter board for my old ssd..so Ill convert over to that when I get a chance.
So quiet.
If your really into building your own check out http://routerboard.com/ We use their gateways and access points in some of the hotels we support and they are pretty powerful. They are based of Linux and can be tweaked to do a lot of things.