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Comment by chungy | Hacker News Reader

OpenWrt has a generic x86 PC build that can also be used to turn basically any random PC into a router, complete with an operating system actually designed and developed for that purpose.

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OpenWRT is great if it fits your use case. If one has reason to stray from the happy path a disadvantage is that the OpenWRT uses a single binary like Busybox and doesn't use glibc. This is great for embedded/low power machines like the OG WRT54G, but not as optimal for when you have an entire random PC. I don't recall the exact things I was looking for but I moved on to pfSense and didn't look back.

> This is great for embedded/low power machines like the OG WRT54G, but not as optimal for when you have an entire random PC.

There are steps in the middle :)

I'm running OpenWRT on the recent WRT3200ACM and it's going beautifully.

And of course probably 1000x the power usage compared to the average off the shelf router that runs off a borderline microcontroller.

good point! I think you can run it on a PI though.

Otoh it would make sense if you could combine it with a home server, then it's just a side process and you actually save power by not having an extra device.

Though you'd still need a switch or two. And a fiber modem which already has a router and a switch built-it. Oops.

It doesn’t have to be. I have a proxmox homelab, running x86 openwrt in a VM. It has many other services running including home assistant. It idles at 3% CPU and consumes around 5w. I’m using a Levono thinkcentre.

Information for the OpenWrt x86 build

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt_x86

Alpine Linux too.

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