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The FCC just saved Netgear from its router ban for no obvious reason (www.theverge.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] [S] 64 points 7 months ago* (15 children)

Time to flash the old Netgear router with some open source firmware.

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  • [–] 37 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (14 children)

    Yep, but unfortunately it's not always as straight forward as it may sound. Plus, with routers becoming more difficult to acquire, it'll only get harder and harder to pull off. But there's OpenWRT and dd-WRT that work with a pretty decent range of routers as well as ASUS Merlin for many ASUS routers. Then, if you want to get nerdy with it and build your own router from an old computer, there's OPNsense and pfSense. Eventually it'll come down to these two if the ban is longterm and you want any semblance of obfuscation online...

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 7 months ago

    Yes, OPNsense is excellent if you have a spare computer to run it. Then you can repurpose your consumer router as a WiFi access point. I still feel safer flashing the old WiFi router with open firmware before using it even as a WAP.

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    GL.iNet are flashable and come with their fork of OpenWRT out of the box. I run the latest regular OpenWRT on mine.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    What about regular do you find preferable to than their fork of WRT?

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    Just that it is FOSS without any black box binary blobs. It is stable and works great so why not.

    Edit: I don't have anything against the custom fork.

    Edit 2: That it is supported in the mainline OpenWRT means it will be updated with security and features even if the custom fork is abandoned.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

    I tried getting into the nerdy side. I have an old PC with only one NIC, but apparently it needs two in order to bridge to a WiFi AP? That makes sense, but I don’t have an old PC with two NICs. Also, my NIC doesn’t support as much bandwidth as I have supplied anyhow. Sad times.

    Edit: the desktop is old enough that the mobo doesn’t have the slots I need. Effectively, I have to get a new old burner PC. It’s an old ThinkCentre with a dvd player built in.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Well ya, you need at least two NICs to properly setup a firewall. Additionally, since NICs are the most crucial piece of hardware for routers and firewalls, it'll only be as good as the hardware it runs on. Older NICs lead to regular crashes and/or slow network speeds. So swapping the original NIC out and adding another is VERY typical when repurposing old PCs as a router. The most common options for NICs I've seen are the Intel I350-T2 and I350-T4. Ironically, they cost about as much as a decent router, but going this route actually puts you in control of your home network!

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    you need at least two NICs to properly setup a firewall.

    I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but two (or more) VLANs on a single NIC would work fine too. This setup is usually referred to as "router on a stick"

    I'm not sure about other OSes or Linux distros, but it's easy to add multiple VLANs on Debian. You load the 8021q kernel module, then add interfaces suffixed with the VLAN ID (e.g. if your NIC is ens3, you'd add ens3.10 to /etc/network/interfaces for VLAN 10). You'd also need to make sure the switch port is configured to allow VLAN10.

    Older NICs lead to regular crashes and/or slow network speeds.

    but the ones you're suggesting (I350-T2 and -T4) are 12 years old.

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  • [–] -5 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Great, now I just need everyone else to do this, I can have the greatest most rebust setup imaginable, what am I gonna use it for? To talk to the other two people with similar setups?

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I assure you there are multiple people on this thread alone that have this setup. It's not like you somehow can't access the public internet once you've got a homemade router.

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