1. Persistent DNS cache using pdnsd (even after reboot because it is on-disk) with a long minimum global TTL. You would imagine this would be a problem, but surprisingly I haven't had any. I've only had to get in once to correct something. You can manually purge a specific domain, and all of them if you think something is wrong.
2. Powerful enough for good OpenVPN settings. Automatically routes through a VPN, and can be disabled for a specific client if needed. The AES instructions (which are on any Intel chip after 2008) help out immensely compared to using just a generic router.
3. Smoother LAN transfers. A cheap gigabit PCIe card (Intel EXPI9402PT - on ebay for about $20) which takes away local transfer rate problems, especially if you have an NAS.
4. Use it as an NAS. It isn't a good idea to mix devices which need good security with non-critical systems, like NAS so be sure about your settings and know what you are doing.
Another cool thing is port forwarding to the remote VPN instance so you can login remotely and check out your network or access any files/media you have on your NAS.
There are more things people can do which give more control and/or better experience, like setting up rate limiting on clients, custom settings for clients with unknown MAC addresses, etc. Traffic shaping is a good one (prioritize specific type of connections over another - example VoIP > Netflix > torrent).
The extra power really opens up the possibilities of what a router can do.
If anyone has any questions, I'd be glad to help out.
What problem does this solve? Is it a bid to improve privacy?
This is especially useful when you have an application which doesn't cache DNS requests and issues a new one for every connection. Torrenting gets a big boost for example.
Privacy is just a side effect.
EDIT: Also, "Torrenting gets a big boost for example." sounds strange, don't trackers give out IP addresses? Why would BitTorrent be DNS bound?
I have it set up to be 1 day. Most websites have been setting up low TTLs like 1 hour or less because they don't want to take a chance in case of a problem, and DNS is cheap or free these days.
About your statement - 'don't trackers give out IP addresses?', what do you mean?
Often trackers are addressed by their domain (I've never actually seen a tracker without one). So each torrent has its own specific set of trackers. So all those trackers are frequently resolved and contacted for peer exchange.
So then the DNS curb would be looking up the hostnames of the trackers, which I'd guess would be under a dozen or so hosts (I don't know, I'm just guessing) per torrent. That seems unlikely to be a hot-spot to the degree that enforcing a long cache would provide a "big boost" to overall performance.
OpenDNS look up for Google just now took me 500ms, even without the VPN. I use tunnel mode for DNS on the NAS, which can easily double it.
I usually build the software from source so I don't know if every thing will work fine for you. Nevertheless here are the package names I remember from when I first set it up.
pdnsd - for DNS caching read the manual so you can write a good config, and don't forget to change the bind IP to an interface so that it is accessible to the local network
openvpn, easy-rsa - Initial setup[2] there is a bug which for which there is a temporary fix[3]. Might be fixed by now.
Port forwarding: I currently use iptables, but I've been trying to move to nftables, which I recommend. Here's how I do it for now (this must be done on the OpenVPN server):
tun0 is the openvpn interface
eno1 is the public ethernet interface of your VPN
Say the IP addr of openvpn CLIENT (router in this case) is 10.8.0.2 - eno1 port you want to forward to is 1234
say the client port (the router port to be forwarded) is 6789
#iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -i eno1 --dport 1234 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.8.0.2:6789
#iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp -d 10.8.0.2 --dport 6789 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
The above commands are not persistent so save them to /etc/iptables.conf
I always choose very conservative settings for firewall. Only a single port is forwarded to the VPN. Rest are closed, spoof open ports, and have a honeypot if you want.
There are many guides on iptables, but I would again recommend nftables. You're going to have to dig deep sometimes since it is still new.
If you have questions about anything, just google. Chances are, it has already been covered several times.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/04/the-ars-guide-to-bui...
[2]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-...
Be careful, this isn't true... most low end Intel chips (Celeron, Pentium, i3) don't support AES-NI. Starting with Skylake chips (2015/2016-era), the whole processor line supports AES-NI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set
>you're much better off with something like an ER-X I pretty much recommend a plain jane router which can run DD-WRT for anyone. All this is clearly overkill, and more importantly useless for most people.
Another choice is getting a cheap NUC like x86 device and get AP-only devices for good coverage.
Extremely happy with the performance and quality. I don't know of any router for $180 that can rival this combination overall.
[1] https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter-x [2] https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap
Runs arm Linux so I also have a VPN server running on it as well. Very convenient to not need a separate device for things like that.
1, IPv6 is not trivial to setup. In my case I struggled to find documentation on configuring it on a PPoE connection.
2, It can't reach 1 GB/s on WAN.
The wAP ac has a stronger and more reliable signal than any other WiFI unit I've tried (various Linksys, Asus, and BT units).
The Mikrotik gear is rock solid, but not exactly what I'd call consumer friendly. Great if you know or want to know something about real routers. I got fed up with buggy consumer routers and decided to go with either Mikrotik or Ubiquity rather than struggle to get the right hardware and firmware combo for Tomato et al. Nothing wrong with these, but none of my existing hardware had an image on the various options.
[1] https://mikrotik.com/product/RBwAPG-5HacT2HnD, $89
[2] https://mikrotik.com/product/RB960PGS, $79
[3] http://uk.tp-link.com/products/details/cat-18_TL-PA4010KIT.h...
[4] Always, always change the HomePlug network name and password :-)
As for the hardware - If you want to use OpenWRT/LEDE you have to be selective about supported WiFi chips. ath9k is battle tested but no ac wifi. ath10k should work reasonable well if you only want to have an access point. Broadcom / Mediatek and others can have issues - stability or signal strength depending on the driver.
Check out kmod-sched-cake and sqm-scripts for the latest in research regarding bufferbloat - https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/Cake/ together with airtime fairness - https://linuxplumbersconf.org/2016/ocw/system/presentations/... you can archive some crazy results in good wifi (only on ath9k / mt76 partly on ath10k).
If you want something off the shelf - Mikrotik and Ubiquity and to a degree TP-Link and Asus models get good reviews. In terms of hardware and antennas Mikrotik and Ubiquity are usally better.
You probably want 802.11ac and 5GHz - at the moment 802.11ac Wave2 is probably not worth the money because you need support on the client side and that is rare.
TP-Link Archer C50 would be my budget pick (30€) and runs LEDE - no Gigabit through. Archer C7 for Gigabit.
If you don't mind soldering a serial console and flashing LEDE using the bootloader get a used Cisco Meraki MR18 / MR24 without licence and wall mount kit for a few $ from ebay - top notch hardware and antennas (but ath9k not ath10k) and lot's of CPU / memory.
I would probably be more happy with ubiquiti unifi
Apart from the Unifi centric hardware, I have an Asus router that currently handles all the routing (also DHCP), and a cable modem.
For some odd reason, after moving to a new house, the Powerline networking in my office degraded from the consistent 300-400Mbps in the old house to < 10Mbps in my new office.
The new house is old, with thick walls, and I wasn't getting good throughput with the old pair of OnHubs I was using, but I figured that enough mesh points would overcome that, and as one of the mesh points is in my office, I've found plugging the desktop ethernet output directly into the ethernet input on the Mesh unit to be extremely performant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquiti_Networks#Open-source_...
"In 2015, Ubiquiti revealed that it lost $46.7 million when its finance department was tricked into sending money to someone posing as an employee."
How does that even happen?
The first time I heard someone is using a pre PHP 3 version. Must be perl/cgi based and really old stuff. Why do they even ship with an inbuilt web server with cgi enabled - it's so outdated and screams 1995 tech. (even back in 2002 cgi, and Perl and PHP3 were considered outdated, and we had already PHP 4)
I'd rather have my wifi be a black box that just works and my router be a little more just raw hardware with openbsd or linux or pfsense.
I bought a cheap gigabit router (from craigslist for around $30) and then bought a wireless range extender ($60) for the far end of the house. The router is not connected to the modem (so obviously no internet). We built our own server to host all the code, exercises, videos, as well as a DNS server. Our gitlab repository is resolved to google.com, so they usually get a kick out of pushing their code to 'google'. We have our own internal q/a site that resolves to facebook.com. Everybody gets to pick their own domain name to host their own projects.
We experience 0 downtime (unless there is a power outage), pushes to our repository is almost instantaneous, and tests run blazing fast on our speedy i7 desktop with 62GB Ram (that I got for $600 on craigslist). Also, students are not limited to their machines, they can code on whichever device they want (as long as it runs chrome or ssh) because code is hosted on the server. This way, we don't have to deal with people's installation problems.
I didn't touch the router's firmware at all. Our server acts as a dns server. However, everybody would have to modify their dns records on their wifi settings to add our server's ipaddress.
Why can't you just push it over dhcp? (This is what I've always done for this use case...)
It has USB 3, GigE, wireless speed has been fine etc... certainly one of the best home tech purchases I've made in the last couple years.
[1] http://www.netgear.com.au/home/products/networking/wifi-rout... [2] https://advancedtomato.com
At one point, the Asus started to become unreliable and unstable so I disabled it and put the $40 TP Link instead.
Now, about 3 years later, I completely forgot about my router setup and this TP link is rocking it every day. I'm really impressed by the brand. I only had to pull the powercord to quickly reset it once, during several years. I can not say this of most other brands I've worked with in the past.
You can run OpenWRT etc on it. It's quite similar to the legendary WRT54G.
I also bought a Wifi 4G portable router from TP Link later, and this is also high quality hardware at affordable prices.
https://www.amazon.de/TP-Link-TL-WR1043ND-Ultimate-Anschluss...
Current router: ASUS AC3100
I'll likely replace it with one of the newer Mikrotik routers soon, mostly because we've started using them at work and for clients and it'd be good to have another spot to get and stay familiar with them. That said, while RouterOS is powerful it has a not insignificant learning curve. I've also seen firmware images and wiki entries indicating that you can run OpenWRT on some models, but I'm not sure how well supported that is.
[1] http://uk.tp-link.com/products/details/cat-9_TL-WR802N.html
Unlike newer models it allows created your own WiFi access point that is routed to the Internet via another WiFI network. Very useful when travelling with multiple iPads and such - no need to connect them all one by one to a hotel WiFi (no need to configure them at all as a matter of fact) and you get your own isolated subnet with working broadcast and multicast.
I would also suggest Ubiquiti and/or pfsense if you want an out-of-box experience.
UAP-AC-LR for the wireless.
https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-10864
Which was easy to upgrade the firmware and then override so I could install Tomato.
At work, a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter. Fast and trouble-free so far, and easier to set up than the Netgears.
Omnia Turris, open hardware, OWRT by default, top tier hardware, HAC encryption, 2.4GHz and 5GHz.
Is the hardware worth 330€? Probably not. But IIRC everything is open source, including the hardware design, which you'd never get from a commercial router.
Is it worth 330€ as a router? CZ.NIC has put a lot of effort into the OS and updates. The router has 8GB of NAND and they are using btrfs to handle updates (snapshot, update, rollback if there are issues).
This kind of update feature doesn't exist in OpenWrt and LEDE, though mainly because most routers ship with 16MB of NOR flash and there simply isn't room to take a snapshot while upgrading. Some routers like the Xiaomi Mi 3 have 128MB of NAND and it would be possible if there was upstream support in LEDE (although that router has other issues with MediaTek WiFi).
So if you're looking for a reasonably secure router that auto-updates, I think it's worth it. Set it and forget it mentality.
If you have the technical skills and time to manage the router yourself, then just buy a low power PC (e.g. PCEngines APU, Solidrun ClearFrog, Marvell MACCHIATTObin) and install Linux/PfSense/OPNSense.
I don't own the Turis myself, I just saw some conference presentations of theirs about how they implemented the Turis.
Everything worked out of the box. No custom software installation, no messing around. I love them both, they're very powerful.
It's easy to install dnsmasq on Synology but now you don't have to do that manually anymore, they have their own package system now which includes a DNS Server built upon dnsmasq.
It is better to get two cheap routers and use one as an AP only. The AP only can be placed where ever you want so it'll have better coverage than a multi-antenna router any day.