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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Better off just building your own router. The high brow option is an embedded motherboard and minipcie wifi card. If the hardware is powerful enough to MASQ gigabit, it won't be obsolete for a decade. And you can upgrade wireless standards with a new card. The only reason there's such an upgrade cycle for consumer routers is that they're built shoddily and with the slowest CPU possible.

And as much as I appreciate spectrum partitioning, we really need to get the major wifi chipsets completely reverse engineered so we can blow away this ambiguous spectre of "unauthorized" modifications and turn them into something normal. Randos stomping on ch12-15 isn't an actual problem - but that widespread rulebreaking coupled with the unknown of what further mods could do is scary to regulators. Destroy that unknown.

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> And as much as I appreciate spectrum partitioning, we really need to get the major wifi chipsets completely reverse engineered so we can blow away this ambiguous spectre of "unauthorized" modifications and turn them into something normal. Randos stomping on ch12-15 isn't an actual problem - but that widespread rulebreaking coupled with the unknown of what further mods could do is scary to regulators. Destroy that unknown.

There was a lot of resistance to allowing unlicensed use of 5.25-5.35 GHz and 5.47-5.725 GHz precisely because some were afraid that unauthorized modifications would be commonplace, and devices could not be relied upon to sense and avoid the RADAR systems that also operate in those bands. So bear in mind that the more you insist on modifying, the harder it will be to persuade the FCC to open up new unlicensed bands.

Curious why we have home devices run on the same band as airport radar systems and what-not.

Seems here the original regulation was the problem, not people modding their home routers.

The answer is pretty simple: we are desperately in need for more spectrum (at least in urban areas), licensed and unlicensed, for wireless internet traffic. And there really are no unused bands that can simply be reallocated for this purpose without dealing with the users already in the band.

Although airport RADARs sound like a poor choice of a service to share spectrum with, they have the benefit of being stationary, not very numerous, and typically located far from the urban cores where the spectrum is needed most.

Can a single modified home router actually cause disturbance to a RADAR?

Or are we talking about a widespread use of such devices?

Short range radar no, long range yes. The problem with using those frequencies (for WiFi) are that they are very useful for radar, they reflect off rain drops very well and propagate in the clear very well.

> The only reason there's such an upgrade cycle for consumer routers is that they're built shoddily and with the slowest CPU possible.

A lot of this is that consumers have been taught that routing, NAT, etc isn't done by a general purpose computing device like a PC or server, but that those tasks MUST be relegated to an appliance.

But compute is compute, and antennas are antennas. And the word "appliance" has long held a secret meaning of "a Linux server on your Windows (or local area) network."

I hadn't actually put those thoughts together - which is funny considering I've been working a lot with embedded boards lately.

So.... how could you custom-build something akin to say, the Netgear Nighthawk (Netgear R8000)? I'm thinking multiple 802.11ac antennae with all that new multi-user beamforming stuff that's been released lately. Is there open firmware that supports that / do the commodity Linux drivers support controlling and fine-tuning that kind of function?

Added: Interesting.... There's an x86 port of DD-WRT:

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/X86

All the fancy wifi stuff is part of the wifi chipset, which most router vendors tend not to have any hand in - especially for consumer stuff. (also, beamforming is a very misleading term). You can basically buy a card that does all this stuff 'off the shelf', and could even plug it into a laptop. Though, antenna placement may be something you'd need to do some research on.

My router runs dd-wrt and cost me 50$. It uses iptables for a firewall and only burns 12W max. That's hard to beat going the custom route.

consumers have been taught that routing, NAT, etc isn't done by a PC or server, but MUST be relegated to an appliance.

Because that's far more reliable. People don't want their whole home's Internet to go down every time they reboot their computer (and buying an extra computer to do routing is a big waste of money/complexity). Not to mention households that only have laptops.

If that's the highbrow option, what's a mini-ITX motherboard with an AMD 5350, 4GB RAM, an SSD and an Intel 4-port gig-e card plus the onboard gig-e?

Scout NewEgg for combos -- you too can run a fully supported OS on x86-64 instruction sets with familiar hardware, but at a low cost of both purchase and power.

You built a server that also happens to route?

I was thinking the low brow option would be an old laptop, but that's not going to suffice for someone who wants to keep up with wireless protocols (due to the same FUD under discussion). Obviously you can fix this (coreboot or modded BIOS), but specificity and tinker factor is going way up.

It's the rise of low power general boards that really make this practical. I tried out the ECS E2100 board for a remote server, and with a silver PS it drew around 15W from the wall. It didn't work with the RAM I already had though, so I ended up going with an i5 which still only measured around 20W before I put drives in.

I was thinking the low brow option would be an old laptop, but that's not going to suffice for someone who wants to keep up with wireless protocols

Many laptops have mini-PCIe slots for the WLAN, so you could buy a new card and stick it in. Note that if you want to run 5GHz and the laptop didn't previously support it, you might need new antennas too.

The other caveat is that with some laptops the BIOS will allow only a particular WLAN card to be used. Which is annoying.

> some laptops the BIOS will allow only a particular WLAN card to be used

Yeah, that's what I was referring to. The FUD of "unapproved changes" invalidating the FCC's approval for the antenna system leads the manufactures to create those restrictions. Since the end user making a modification well after the sale has nothing to do with the manufacturer, I call it FUD. (Of course the user isn't selling their modified device over state lines either, but I disgress).

My experience is primarily limited to Thinkpads and a few crappy consumer models that I've inherited. But I figure the better designed laptops that can make it to "old" and not overheat with continuous usage are more likely to have those restriction lists.

Manufacturers like HP and Lenovo don't only have the FCC to worry about upsetting. They have to worry about regulators in every other country, too. So they want to make sure their type approvals can't be breached.

Better off just building your own router.

Highly unlikely and unnecessarily expensive. It's also a hassle to make a nice enclosure for what you build. Instead, you can currently consult the OpenWRT website, pick up any of many widely available $50 routers, and be set.

I don't care if it can MASQ gigabit since I don't have a gigabit connection. Whatever slowest CPU possible they put in there is more than enough to run a couple of VLANs, VPNs, IPv6 tunnel, and Samba. Not only that but you can easily recycle older hardware (for additional APs for example) or reuse what you already have.

Yeah there was a dead zone in my house that was so bad, I was about to buy a $100 repeater. Then on a whim, I googled "DD-WRT bridge" sure enough there's some black magic that allows me to use my old WRT54g without creating more e-waste. Also, my new Asus router had to be rebooted about once a month until I found and flashed it with Asuswrt-Merlin firmware.

Just in the past year, I've found 2 great uses for custom firmware, rejuvenate old hardware and improvements to official f/w. I'm going to do some more research and send them a piece of my mind:

https://www.fcc.gov/comments

A noob question: what does MASQ refer to?

Also, do you have any suggestions for a motherboard + minipcie combo? I'd like to get off of our DSL router soon-ly.

MASQ refers to IP Masquerading or Network Address Translation (NAT)

(slap forehead) OK. Got it, now. Thanks.

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