Building your own router/switch?

Messiah Khan

Messiah Khan

Messiah Khan

Soldato
Joined
1 Sep 2005
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Scottish Highlands
Has anyone here built their own router and/or switch? My Netgear DG834G seems to be starting to pack up. The network sockets will only run at 10Mbps without dropping frames left right and centre. So I have had to combine 2 Prosafe switches and the router to make it all run stable but it does mean a 10Mbps bottleneck for the wireless side of my network.

Ideally I would want any new router or switch to be rack mountable which has made me think about the idea of building my own. Ideally I would want a 1 or 2U rackmount chassis set up to run with low power and very low noise. Kit it out with 12-16 Nics, 1-2 ADSL2 modems, Wireless AP and run it on some sort of Linux router distro.

So has anyone done this or have any thoughts or suggestions for parts?
 
If you do end up bothering, I'd be looking at using pfsense, but tbh I'd rather just buy some used cisco kit.

I had a pfsense box up and running for a while, with 2x quad-port intel PRO/1000 NICs, and a dual-port PRO/1000. Whilst it was "ok", it isn't anywhere near as good as the Cisco kit I run.
 
Thanks for the suggestion. Out of interest what Cisco kit should I be considering? (Ie, has the required functionality without breaking the bank)
 
What connections will you be connecting to? Or rather, what kind of line speed do you need to be running on your DSL connections?
 
Cisco are an excellent business grade "set and forget" solution. However if you want to have full "tweakability" be aware that this really is a hardcore option since many functions cannot be fully configured from the GUI and you'll need to learn some IOS cmd line e.g. to program the ADSL failover behaviour. Also if you don't have access to firmwares then you won't get updates as they are not free from Cisco.

Pfsense has a lot going for it (besides cost) e.g SW modules and hardware can be bolted on later to keep up with your own needs. There's also quite a large choice of PC or embedded HW available. With it being actively developed it should only get better over time, but the trade off is that the current release version 1.2.x is only getting bugfixes since efforts are now focused on the new 2.x codebase. If you've got an old PC spare then I'd definitely say to at least test install it and see what you think before laying out cash on something else.

Mikrotik is somewhere between the two, but I haven't tried it myself.

Do you really need all the LAN ports to be built-in and thus configured from the router? If not, then it would probably be a lot simpler to build say 5 interfaces into the router (e.g. 2 WAN, 2 LAN, 1 AP) and the rest added via a seperate smartswitch.
 
What didn't you like about it paradigm? I have personally found pfsense pretty powerful but I'm a cisco newb.
 
vsmora said:
many functions cannot be fully configured from the GUI and you'll need to learn some IOS cmd line e.g. to program the ADSL failover behaviour.
Click to expand...

If you're even using the GUI at all you shouldn't be using Cisco in the first place, it's rubbish and it generates less than logical configurations, if you don't know IOS, don't use Cisco.

That said, I have a powerful hatred of pfsense, which may be something to do with the idiots who deploy it (comically badly) in business environments but I don't like the way multiple things are configured either, it might be easy but it's not logical in terms of the protocols.
 
If you want to build your own, you can get an Atom motherboard, stick it in a short depth 1U case, add a riser card and put in an intel pro/1000, then get a cheap rackmounted gigabit switch and you will have everything you need with them 2x 1U boxes.

When it comes to router software you have a lot of choice, but looking at some of the latest Hak5 stuff, untangle seems to be realy useful.
 
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