I meant pfsense does more than the *-WRTs. All kinds of plugin modules like antivirus and such. Cool stuff. And ya...I felt kind of dirty suggesting a BSD based solution on here! -Mike On Mon, Aug 5, 2013 at 6:45 PM, Alex Pilon <alp [ at ] alexpilon [ dot ] ca> wrote: > > 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 >