> On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 12:59 PM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday [ at ] crashcourse [ dot ] ca>wrote: > > friend wants to buy a wireless router […] i haven't looked at the > > possibilities in a while -- any suggestions for a state-of-the-art > > wireless router for which there is ready support for reflashing with > > linux? On Mon, Aug 05, 2013 at 04:51:03PM +0000, Mike Hopper wrote: > If he REALLY wants something to play with...why not a REAL router? “Real” router? Like 32-cores of Xeon, 32GiB RAM, 8 NICs, each with 8 hardware queues and plenty of features to offload work to the card? No. Just kidding. Those are for carrier-grade telephone switching, but sitting around 0.5 load average in the lab. Not wireless anyway. > Kits from this website are cheap(ish), solid, and you choose the > OS:http://store.netgate.com/Desktop-Kits-C82.aspx(there are many more > of these sites). There's also the Soekris. Not exactly state-of-the-art (generic, good quality SBCs that have been ought for a few years, or more depending on the model). This one, http://soekris.com/products/net4826.html is on sale too. He'd just have to get a mini-PCI wireless adapter. There's also the RouterBOARDs. Don't bother with MicroTik firmware. It's a heavily modified old version of Linux (I heard 2.4 but could be wrong, and yes, there's still other carrier grade equipment running 2.4 out there). It is not as amenable to hacking as just taking the stock Linux source and compiling it yourself (yes, I know this wasn't about the software). I'd encourage him to just `make nconfig`, and pay particular attention to what's under net and drivers/net, if he still has anything to learn. > Just add a wireless AP or one of their add-on cards Could also check out this. http://www.simplewifi.com/ > and you have a pretty nice router. Throw pfsense > (http://www.pfsense.org/) on there and you can do much more than > *-WRT. Heh. Thought this was a Linux list. Not taking sides though… yet. Did you mean more than the *WRT's custom interfaces allow you to do, or more than Linux in general does? If the latter, what in particular? > > and wants to install one of the common linux-based distros on it > > (openwrt, dd-wrt, tomato, whatever). […] price not that much of an > > object, what he wants mostly is the opportunity to hack. If you *really* want to hack, stay away from all the GUI and abstractions, and just use ip6?tables, tc and the rest of iproute2, ipset, etc., directly. They're fundamentally simple. At some point, these abstractions just get in the way and haven't put a ‘nicer’ (or not) interface around feature X, or are otherwise barely concealed overhead. I've never seen the worth of a GUI that just mangles some of the concepts, and don't want HTTP or other similar running on my router. Regards, Alex Pilon