[PLUG] Recommend home router software?

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Wed Aug 12 20:59:54 UTC 2015


On Wed, 12 Aug 2015, eehouse wrote:

> I've been running LEAF (http://leaf.sourceforge.net/bering-uclibc/) 
> for years on general purpose mini computers like those from 
> PCEngines (http://www.pcengines.ch/) and soekris 
> (https://soekris.com/). I'm happy with the hardware, but suspect 
> LEAF's original focus on fitting on floppy disks is keeping it from 
> being as featureful as I'd like.
>
> Any recommendations? I'm not afraid of commandline interfaces, but 
> am willing to use one those GUI thingies if it brings real benefits.

I've had great luck with pfSense:

   https://www.pfsense.org/download/

It's BSD-based, so it uses pf rather than iptables for filtering, but 
it's easy to use, very feature-full, and doesn't have any trouble 
running on machines with Atom-class processors.

Configuration is generally done via the GUI, though I've had occasion 
to change some things manually via command-line operations.

> I think the most challenging thing I'm likely to want to configure 
> my router to do is switch from its outbound ethernet connection to 
> USB when a tethering smartphone is attached (since our DSL is MUCH 
> slower than LTE, and sometimes we really need the greater speed.)

pfSense will support any USB NIC supported by FreeBSD, so you'll have 
to research its compatability with your hardware.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/



More information about the PLUG mailing list