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I built a router last night


Rally Pat

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After 3 or so years or so of service to my household, my Linksys WRT54G version 1 router finally died out. I was shopping around for a new one when it hit me that I could just build one myself. So I started looking around my house for parts. After a trip to the computer Pick-n-Pull in my garage, I dug out an old Gateway PIII 500 that someone had given me. I also found some more ram (128x3) to put into it, as well as a 20gig hd. I harvested 4 identical Linksys 10/100 nic cards, and a 52x CD-Rom drive.

 

For the software to drive all of this, I found IPCop, a linux distro that will turn any computer into a router-firewall. Also, because this is open source, you do not have any of the restrictions that a normal store-bought router comes with from the factory. This means that if you are an avid Bittorrenter, this is the best solution to get the fastest speed. The only problem at this point is that setting up wireless on it is sort of difficult, but that is next on my list.

 

After you install all of the hardware, and run the setup CD, you can configure it just like any normal router by accessing it through any browser. For now, I got it to run right and it is managing the entire network. The only problem I am having right now is that when I set up PPPoE, it doesn't seem to want to try to make my modem connect to the DSL network. I ran out of time last night to solve the problem, but hopefully I will have it fixed soon.

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The wireless thing is not that hard to deal with. Either get an internal wireless card that will to configure to be an access point or go buy a simple access point (not a wireless router) and connect it to one of the router ports. If you do that you can also do some custom router configurations and protect your local wired network from your wireless network and disallow NetBIOS, SMB and other 'hacking' traffic. This along with the security configurations on the access point (mac address filters, WEP Keys and encryption) will get you a pretty secure network. To get even more out of hand with it and go balls to the wall with the security, you can put in a Radius server (freeradius or another opensource software) and an access server that would reference the Radius box to provide network access to anything including the internet from the wireless connection.

 

Yes I realize this is just something for home. But if you do it at home and make it work, then when you are at work and need to do something like this, you can just bang it out and look real intelligent to your peers and bosses.

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