How to build a Linux-based wireless router out of spare parts (1998)
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The bandwidth was provided by alt.coffee, a coffee and Internet cafe. It took some convincing to get the owners of alt.coffee to let me do this because they thought it would be bad for business. I had to convince them that people who could afford laptops with wireless weren't renting their computers, but they'd likely buy coffee. It worked :)
The laptop ran NetBSD and was installed in the awning of Accidental CDs a few doors down from alt.coffee because they were open 24/7, so someone was always at the front of the store. It routed its own private subnet that the NetBSD router in alt.coffee NAT'd and provided public IPv6 via 6bone.
I used 10BASE2 coax cable so I could run it along the building and nobody would mess with it, because it blended in perfectly with all the cable TV coax running on the outside of the building.
Aside from replacing the hard drive once, it ran for several years before regular access points became affordable.
What fun!
Rent is too damn high for anything else
> and provided public IPv6
Honestly this is the part that surprised me the most. It's funny how unevenly the future has been distributed:)
(As of early 2023 I appear to have finally gotten service to my house that reliably has IPv6. In 2022 this was not the case.)
I had never been truant from school before up to that point, but sometimes life rewards you for taking risks.
You know, I'm still running servers with many of the same accounts that were there twenty years ago. Your home may still be on one (with the password disabled, obviously). Write me directly and let's see!
My email address is my first name @ my last name dot com, and my handle here is my full name.
It was so nice to switch from being tied to wires, to many hours with table service at local coffee shops in santa cruz like the Perg, and 420 union, in Santa Cruz. Sadly, both are gone now....
There are what look like "supernodes" for LinkNYC near the park, and somebody set up receiver hardware on my roof for the other network, but I haven't yet figured out who.
I wish more thought about making wifi better. It could be so much more awesome now if we just sank more thought and resources into it. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/
I really do, still, 25 years later, remember sitting on that roof, in the rain, feeling like the world had shifted into another phase, had transcended somehow.
The future was right there, spreading out in waves from our antenna, and from others. Not part of that story... but later on the woz got service from our downlink fella, also...
I just realized that nobody knows who mike taht was (co-author of that doc - and I do not know where greg's writing began and mine started, he was always more howtoish than I). Perhaps that is best and I shouldnt be popping up on this thread.(I changed my name to dave when I first tried to retire in Nicaragua because I was tired of being a computer guy and wanted to just focus on music)
I thought this was me that posted this and forgot I posted it. I did this exact thing with same equipment back in college.
My reasoning was slightly different. I did do it just for fun but also I wanted to run multiple computers and servers and the university was pretty strict on the one computer per connection rule.
That little pile of PC debris eventually became a dialup POP for a local girl I met on IRC who was at constant war with her older brother over their shared AOL account, despite having their own computers w/phone lines. Fun times, those teen-aged years.
Linux was such a game changer back then, enabling kids to deploy their own ISP if they just read the HOWTOs and collected enough computer trash.
There were no girls on fidonet as best as I recall.
Adjusted for inflation, $1300 in 1998 dollars is equivalent to nearly $2400 in today's dollars. The $3100 manufacturer price would be equivalent to $5700 today.
Really puts into perspective how accessible computing and hardware have become.
I would like to stop upgrading routers every two years (maybe just upgrade the wifi cards in it), and have full control over router's UI (command line is fine).
Is this a stupid idea?
As another FreeBSD-based alternative, there's the PFSense fork OPNSense [1], which started out as a fork of PfSense after the Netgate takeover and complaints about their openness and support for the community.
I can’t see why I should need to upgrade anything hardware related for some time.
For what it's worth, I put up an already old, extremely cheap TP-Link AP inside an old greenhouse some 5 years ago, and it's still working. Stopped working twice from being full of rain water (coming from holes in the roof), and it started working again after I drained the water and dried it for a few days.
I use the 2.4GHz extensively for phones/tablets/NoT devices and haven't noticed any problems with it. I don't actually use the 5GHz too much it but it seems to work. As far as newer technologies, I've never felt the need to squeeze as much bandwidth as possible out of wireless.
The main router has extensive firewall rules (nftables) and VPN links that would be an unmaintainable low-performance mess on a born-to-be-ewaste consumer router. The distro used to be Debian but I've moved them all to NixOS for easier admin.
I have worked hard to make the ath10k work well on everything.
mt76 is pretty good now, the mt79, coming along. The wifi stack we developed for openwrt is now the default in linux for all these cards. https://www.cs.kau.se/tohojo/airtime-fairness/
I haven't found a need for traffic shaping, with a symmetric Gbit fibre uplink. And if I had wireless contention, the first thing I would do is put a third card in each machine to use an additional channel.
Do you have any pointers to pcie (m.2/mini) cards that use chips supported by m76/m79?
The main thing I'm missing is clients being steered to the best AP. From what I understand this feature is really only found on enterprise gear (with patched hostapd and the like) and isn't readily available in the libre world.
Oh, the ath10k used to suck! :/ https://forum.openwrt.org/t/aql-and-the-ath10k-is-lovely/590...
A sore point for me, is that yes you do need FQ+AQM on your fiber link, and if you are running linux - you probably already are running the no-fuss-no-muss BQL + fq_codel combination on that uplink at that line rate. No knobs, it just works. These days you might want to try cake with no bandwidth setting as a default instead, there. No explicit shaping required, just the native backpressure from BQL.
It is unfortunately highly likely that your ISP is using something like a policer or tail drop on your downlink instead of preseem or libreqos, so believe it or not, shaping the downlink can help a bit more, in some cases. I am a big believer in actual measurements using the flent tool: https://blog.cerowrt.org
I find it weird that mt76/mt79 pcie or m2 cards are so rare. I would like it if they penetrated the laptop market where intel presently dominates with that.
Cynically the "best" AP may often not be the actual one you want. Too many best algorithms depend just on RSSI rather than (for example) sporadic interference on the same channel, causing jitter. A narrower channel width with less folk on it is sometimes better than a wide one duking it out with everyone else.
If you're feeling really fancy, you can built redundant routers and figure out failover; pfsync is available on OpenBSD and FreeBSD which allows for nearly seamless transition of NATed connections. Much easier to manage if you don't have to deal with the scourge that is PPPoE though.
It's a bit of a pain the ass from a hardware sense. OpenWRT is available & easy but there's quite limited hardware (newely no wifi6), but honestly, at this point, I'd much rather use a real computer and some add-in cards.
Alas availability of hardware- specifically AP grade cards & things to plug them into is forsakenly awful. One has to scrounge around for increasingly absurdly priced botique adapters with awful availability. Thankfully we're starting to see m.2 form-factor show up, but it used to all be mini-pcie or just mini-pci, which wifi and only wifi uses & is hard to find. Oh and for real AP grade cards, they have good sized heatsinks and sometimes require auxiliary DC power, which is just like two test point stubs you have to freeform find power for.
For a while Compex was making cards eith equivalent-ish performance (same chipset) to a popular longrunning openwrt router, the Netgear x4s, for significantly under $100. But modern AP chips are super hard to find last I checked, had huge-ish boards, and were over $200.
Its a long hope but AP over USB is something I did for a long time & was never quite right & I eventually gave up, after trying dozens of chipsets, but folk like MediaTek seem to be far lower bullshit than the past shady ass sorrid sad history of wifi, and it feels like it may come about again. The ideal world is that like a $100 wifi usb card would just work. And then we could potentially seed these cheaper things all around; not as powerful or capable maybe, but more than made up for by having much smaller cell size: the actual cure-all of wifi!
Im excited for a world where we get beyond openwrt. It's been great but it's a tight narrow specific fix, on a troubled set of platforms, with a lot of constraints. A small PC-based revolution would be great to see. Just run Debian or Arch, what you know. Have standard & upgradeable componentry for cards. It'd be nice for wifi to not be so very very special & bundled.
During the PogoPlug/SheevaPlug phase I had some nice repurposed hardware that ran upstream Debian, had good ram, and some capable atheros wifi. It was so nice having a less special purpose system, having just a regular computer that happened to have good wifi ap gear plugged in.
Openwrt "works fine" but it feels like a fallback position, something I have merely resorted to, for having failed to do what should be obvious & easy with everyday add-ins.
Doesn't OpenWRT work on x86 hardware just fine? <https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=22.03.3&targe...>
(You can select 32-bit x86 or two other flavors if you don't want to run on x86/64.)
The special purpose nature of openwrt makes it surpemely disinteresting to me. Actually setting up a home network with masquerading, dhcp, some dns is shockingly easy with systemd. Add hostapd and some extras, maybe miniupnpd, traffic shappers, optionally some firewall and you're set.
There's a comfort & perceived desire to "make things simple for oneself" by using "tools meant for the job". But it's a shitty suboptimization. Openwrt isnt really that special or good, it's chiefly just the most aggressively well maintained way to run linux on a lot of little router systems. If that roadblock went away & we could use whatever, there would be a shitload more people trying new stuff atop much more general linux oses.
I've been using openwrt for over q decade. It's fine. It does the job. But it's an evolutionary dead end, will ne what it is forever, and it's a bit special. It has a bunch of NIH'ed smaller sized alternative tools that no one else in the linux multiverse uses. Their own package manager, their own dbus replacement, their own config systems. It's all generally fine but it's made practically no dent in the broader Linux world, it requires a lot of onboarding & learning to get actually decent at, it has a lot of constraints/narrow options, and it'd be lovely if we had any choice at all to run something else, something more normal & regular, but we've beem trapped running openwrt on these weird ass strange devices for almost two decades. It sucks being tied to openwrt, openwrt is the specia system, and having more generic Linux computing we could be doing here has such huge appeal.
I'd love do know how many people use x86 openwrt, for laughs. Dozens? A hundred? How many actually log in & use that machine with any regularity? Openwrt indeed can run on regular hardware, but in practice there's no reason to, no advantage to, no cause here, because if we have real computing hardware that isnt batshit insane & troublesome we immediately reach for mainstream regular Linux distros, not the very special opemwrt thing that exists only really for weird hardware.
I mean, if I didn't _explicitly_ want to use Gentoo Linux on my x86-64 router, I'd be using OpenWRT. OpenWRT is far more than sufficient for the typical home network, and generally quite good enough for a power-user's home network.
Regardless, I brought up OpenWRT on x86 to mention that OpenWRT runs and runs _just fine_ on non-special hardware.
> But it's an evolutionary dead end, will ne what it is forever, and it's a bit special. It has a bunch of NIH'ed smaller sized alternative tools that no one else in the linux multiverse uses.
This... isn't a problem? Like, not even a little bit.
OpenWRT, Vyatta, Juniper's Junos OS, Cisco's iOS, Mikrotik's RouterOS, Ubiquiti's Vyatta fork all use different tooling and have different UIs. Of the set, I prefer Junos (for its transactional configuration application and automated rollback), Mikrotik (for its weird little interactive shell), and OpenWRT (because it's more or less an ordinary Linux with largely-Linux-standard software, and the bulk of the rest of it is shell scripts that you can pretty easily understand and modify if needed).
USB is a terrible idea for latency. CARDBUS was so much better. I hate usb audio interfaces with a passion, also.
OpenWrt has a place in that itty bitty boxes needed custom compilers and close attention paid to very small amounts of d and i-cache, which those running ubuntu + systemd have kind of missed, as well as tight integration with all the core tools like dns and dhcp and a zillion ip protocol encapsulations desktop OSes lack.
I see a lot of ubuntu and debian entering the embedded space now that cpus have got cache and memory to burn, and I do hope that one day we see more wifi pci cards that can actually function as APs, and antennas that work.
Presently that is hard to do - the iwl wifi6 cards kind of suck, and it is hard to find mt79 chips, and the ath10k was a huge step backwards from the ath9k in many respects.
Re: wifi cards, I've not seen any wifi cards that seem like a suitable replacement to a dedicated AP. I just use a consumer Asus router in bridge mode instead of router mode.
I once did that, essentially just a linux PC with extra network cards. It doubled as a NAS too. One issue is simply that when you are playing with it (updates and all that), you won't have a router and you will lose internet access for all your connected devices. You also have to consider power outages (UPS highly recommended) and electricity costs. It gives you a lot of flexibility, but it also gives you a hobby. In the end I backed off and got an off-the-shelf router like everyone else, the server is still there, but it doesn't do routing anymore. Sure, I lose a bit of control, but it works, and solving problems is usually just "turn it off and on again", and I don't want to play hotline when my roommate loses internet access.
A compromise is take an off-the-shelf router and flash an alternative firmware like OpenWrt.
Also, why do you need upgrading routers every two years? Things don't move that fast, and widespread adoption of new standards even less so. If WiFi is the reason you change so much, you can buy access points and connect them to your router with wires.
For my system, the only update I need to reboot for is a kernel upgrade. For everything else I can restart individual services, which leaves routing and firewalling completely untouched. And when I _need_ to reboot the thing, it takes right around 30 seconds from the time it stops passing traffic until the time traffic starts flowing again.
> You also have to consider power outages (UPS highly recommended) and electricity costs.
Power outages aren't a concern, as the rest of my networking gear isn't on a UPS. But boy, howdy are you right about the power costs. I've gone from drawing 12W _max_ (read as "_never_") to more like 20W _idle_, and way, way more if I'm performing updates.
> If WiFi is the reason you change so much, you can buy access points and connect them to your router with wires.
Yeah, I strongly recommend this. Separating your APs from your router is a smart move.
My own reasons are
1. It's an extra piece of hardware, when I already have an underutilized server
2. The consumer router web ui is terrible, updates are painful, diagnostics are lacking, etc
3. More power with linux, and a consistent interface for it
Linksys (and others) even make some where this is supported out of the box.
I've been running this configuration for 3 years. There's no fancy UI, but there's also no awful vendor code involved. I don't think about my router anymore, and internet issues no longer occur inside my house, at all. It achieves line rate in both directions while also consistently maintaining less than 10ms of bufferbloat.
I have been working on making cake work for ISPs of late: https://libreqos.io/
The software stack is pretty basic:
- IPtables for routing and firewall
- DNSMasq for DNS cache and DHCP
- Hostapd for wireless
For all home routers today - strongly recommend the SQM smart queue management) system that is actually a derivative of what we developed at that house, circa 2002, on everything - fq_codel and cake can help modern wired and wireless tech a lot.
1) There are only a few standards that changed. You didn't need to upgrade unless you bought a low-end device first and then upgraded to a high end for more speed on the same standard.
2) You need to also upgrade the clients to support the new standard. If you didn't upgrade the clients, the new router was a waste.
3) Speed differences are significat on paper, but not so much in real life.
- 802.11b = you can have SD video streaming with this link
- 802.11g = you can have 1080p video streaming.
- 802.11n = enough for UHD videos.
Between b and n, speed increase is ~10 times, but the ethernet was always at least 10 times faster than any wifi and with a *reliable* connection. So if you are using wifi for heavy data transfers other than live video on a *mobile device*, then you're doing it wrong.
1) Modern routers actually use modern hardware. Nobody builds routers today with 2010's network interfaces or CPUs.
2) Modern hardware is only modern now. You can replace the wifi once or twice, but at some point new adapters won't fit the old slot on the MB. Then you need to change everything: CPU, memory, etc.
3) It will cost a lot more initially, then only a little less than a router when you replace the wifi card and then a lot more when you have to upgrade everythig (see #2).
4) Wifi cards have big issues with linux kernel/drivers. Many have no linux support at all, many are proprietary binary blob driver only, so you can't upgrade the kernel version, many are unmaintained and don't support new protocols such as WPA3, and many only support client mode, so you can't create access points with them.
5) Routers usually have proprietary acceleration for NAT and other network operations. Until ~recently, linux had no acceleration at all and even today, most routers are a lot faster with their official firmware than with OpenWrt or DD-WRT. With any open source linux you only get more flexibility, not speed.
6) It will eat your time permanently. There will always be updates to be done, incompatibilities to debug, bugs to fix, stuff to adjust, performance graphics to waste time looking at, logs to monitor... If this is what you want, go for it. Creating a linux router is very educational, but be warned that anything linux-related is VERY time consuming.
7) If you want to use anything else other than a SBC, or use a separate ethernet switch, it will consume more power than a router. Then you need a bigger UPS, which consumes even more power. Power costs over 2 years might be more the price of the router you replaced.
[1] https://www.keenansystems.com/store/engenius_senao_200mw_pcm...
[2] https://components101.com/articles/metal-oxide-varistor-mov-...
Thin times by the standards of the life I live these days, but good times, too.
Booting linux on an internet café from a floppydistro because I didn’t really know what linux was and my parents wouldn’t let me try stuff on the “home computer”.
What was it, coyote linux? Can’t really remember now :)
I used to build small networks including supplying 386 boxes that booted LRP from a floppy to share a dialup internet connection for small businesses or university student houses. A lot were 10b2 internal networks since they didn't need to spend extra on a hub.
Later, I remember choosing a Cisco Aironet 350? PCMCIA 802.11b card over the ORiNOCO (probably on price as I think both had wide compatibility and good power output) to use both in my NEC mobilepro and with a few improvised long-range wifi links. I built cantennas and biquads to get remote access to free and fast university internet....
Also remember trying to get my hands on a Senao 200mW PCMCIA card to squeeze out more range.
Greg and I and Everett went on to many greater things. I should probably note it was his gf at the time that first caused me to learn how to solve some of the root causes of bufferbloat - she would run this game that ate our whole 1Mbit connection until wondershaper came along.
I am doing an AMA here, in late march, if you have any questions about what happened to me... or wifi... since 1998.
https://discuss.broadband.money/c/broadband-grant-events/dav...
Why can't Intel make some?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb-UnHDw02o&t=1560&themeRefr...
Broadcom can roast in hell.
Previously documented and viewable page omissions is Wayback Machine's court order problem.
I am still around and still working in tech -- although nowadays work involves poking API's to launch servers and related infrastructure vs. the time that this article was written where someone in my line of work had to drive to the datacenter whenever a server needed an upgrade or became unresponsive. My roommate at the time is still around too, his work is in the realm of reducing internet latency in routers by doing clever things with their packet buffers.
Some 5 or 10 years after the howto was written Cisco/Belkin reached out to us. Someone had patented putting a wireless card in a router, and they wanted our help with showing there was prior art. That process opened my eyes because to a couple guys like us it seemed like an obvious thing to do to put a wireless card in and network with it, like any other network card at the time it just had an antenna instead of a cat5 cable. Nothing 'inventive' about doing it, its just a logical step. I think they ended up settling so maybe that original patent-holder gets a couple cents on every wireless router, not sure.
I remember the hostname that document was served from when it was written, a tower PC hostname 'screamingslave' (NiN reference), and it served that document from the Redwood Estates (remote) side of the wireless link. 'for work' my work is all cloud infra, I still run my own personal server -- something I built and configured to run openstack, to be a "cloud in a box" -- hostname 'mantaro' (a reference to the river that is the source of the amazon), and that document is served from a VM running within, hostname 'immora' (doom reference).
It seems to be surviving the HN hug-of-death so far, but it was written in what was state-of-the-art for 1998, just a plain html doc, with maybe a css style sheet (did the original even have that?). Yeah no Nuxt/Vue SPA with some nosql backend.
If you wanna see another of my efforts in 98, I was also involved in bringing 'directory services' to Linux, tldr something more modern (at the time) than NIS, using LDAP for managing your users and other directory objects. That doc can be found here http://www.rage.net/ldap/ldapns-howto/
I never found out if they settled the case or not... I was quite irked at everyone about a patent that seemed so obvious...
Since then a lot of folk have come out to me about how we ALL were in just those few months, inventing the wifi future. We all invented it together, and you and I wrote enough of our bit down so everyone could invent more.
For those here that don't know my work on bufferbloat, I have kept on fixing wifi, with the outputs of the make-wifi-fast project finally the default in the linux kernel, and fq_codel/sqm/cake also covering the world. https://lwn.net/Articles/705884/
wish it was taking less time for the news and implementations of that to spread than it has.
that said, whoever thought ldap was a sane way to organize information... oh, I dont want to get into it...