Homebrewed Router Using OpenWRT

I love my old hardware, and I can never let it go if it still works. I still have a couple of floppy drives that I keep even though I can’t imagine a use for them. I still have a hardware 56k dialup modem, a PCI vga card, and Nvidia AGP vga card, and so forth, just occupying space in a box in the back of my closet.

A few years ago I started a project to build a router using some of that old hardware, and I had to make some additional purchases to flesh it out, specifically, I picked up a couple of dual-port, Intel-based NICs, a wifi card based on the Qualcomm Atheros chipset with AP mode support, always accounting for the ports available on a specific motherboard, an Asus board I purchased in 2007 that had two PCI-e ports, but the rest were just PCI. I monkeyed around with it, got it to sort of work, but it wasn’t reliable and it was easier just to plug in the off-the-shelf router and move on rather than fight with it and never get it to perform as good as the device tuned just to that purpose. So, I guess you’d say I gave up on the project.

So six years later, this past weekend in fact, I decided to take another stab at it. I reassembled all of that hardware, and the system powered on and then I started looking for a distro for it, and I usually just default to Arch, or maybe Debian, and I looked into Ubuntu server, but then it hit me to check into OpenWRT, which I already run on my Linksys, but I guess it never occured to me that it would work on an x86 machine, but in fact it does. A version of OpenWRT is available for just about any platform out there, so I imaged the SSD with it, booted it up, and BAM! It just works.

It is actually pretty incredible. I log in to the LUCI interface, and it is already serving my internet connection to one of those LAN ports. I add a few packages, notably the Atheros drivers for the wireless card, and BAM! It is serving a wireless connection. A few tweaks and a few fine tunings, and this thing is serving my Internet connection over wireless much faster than the dedicated Linksys wifi router I had been using. Much faster. I suppose that’s because it has the power of the AMD dual-core chip and the 4 gigs of DDR2 backing it, compared to the Marvell A7 chip with 128 megs of ram on the Linksys. Plus, OpenWRT is so light and efficient in the first place, this is actually a beast of a router, and a really good use of some old hardware that was just collecting dust a couple of days ago.

I’m going to be interested in how stable it will be, but so far, it is rock-solid.