Build your own Router/AP

Mercutio

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Jan 17, 2002
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I am omnipresent
I bought one of these earlier this week. I plan to plug in a pair of mini-PCI 802.11 cards I have sitting around and to turn the whole thing into what I hope will be a vastly more powerful and reliable access point than the Linksys units that keep breaking on me.

If I get any good at building them and setting them up, I plan to replace the APs I've put at customer sites with these.
 
Which OS are you planning to run on it? Is it one of those Linux jobies made specifically for routers?
 
I'll probably try it with Linux. I'm not sure how far I'll get, but there are distributions made for these things. There's a pre-built appliance OS for them as well, for the ddruedings of the world.
 
Do you need a pair of 802.11's to make the router work, or can it get by with just one?
 
If it's a wired router that acts as a wireless access point, no. If you want to do fun things like repeat wireless signals, or have 2 wireless zones (secure and insecure) than you need two.
 
I don't *need* a pair of NICs. My thinking was to provide an 802.11g and an 802.11a network.

Or you could have two "g" networks, one on an intranet and the other sitting in a DMZ with internet access only. Or provide a "b"-only network and a "g"-only network, so "b" clients don't kill "g" bandwidth.

And so on.
 
OK, was just curious. I didn't know how the store-bought units worked internally, so I thought there might be a reason why two were needed.

This seems like a decent thing...what are you going to use as a case for it?
 
I have the Geode-based mainboard, a chassis, a power supply and a pair of Atheros (work well with Linux) based miniPCI cards that I've stolen out of dead laptops. I'm not sure what I'm going to do for an antenna yet, but I have some nice Hawking omnidirectionals sitting in a box.

The power ratings on some of the cards from the site I linked are just staggering.
 
The only problem I see is that all of the ethernet ports are 100base-T. That's probably fine for an AP-only situation, but pretty crappy for a router role. Really, you want at least one gigabit port for that; and, preferably, all.

Can a daughter card resolve this situation?
 
Merc, I was curious how you made out with the home built wireless device. I'm still interested and was curious if it was worth the time and money for one of these.
 
I built it and sold it to a customer who'd had too many WRT54Gs die. They balked at the price - I think I charged them $500 where they were used to paying $60, but after explaining that I could actually fix it if it broke and the individual parts all had long warranties - and the industrial alternative was an expensive Cisco device - they went along with it.

Range and signal strength is somewhat better (compared to a stock Linksys, about 10 feet of extra radius before the signal dropped) with the very modest NICs I put in mine, but I know there were options as much as three times the transmitting power.

Setup was kind of a hassle since I did not completely know what I was doing.

My thought in the future might be to use junk laptops instead of expensive micro designs.
 
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