Hack a consumer router or DIY/Custom Kit for a kick ass router

Question

So I am currently running a old school hacked Linksys WRT54G and have played around with some of the hacks and currently running Tomato on it and I am pretty happy (tho the lack of OpenVPN Server suck) but I need an upgrade to something with 802.11N and I bet I am not the only one.

The options right now are

1. Grab a hackable consumer 802.11 Dual Band-N router and throw on it DD-WRT, OpenWRT or Tomato again
2. Build my own using old hardware (dont really want to, feel they eat too much power for a simple task)
3. Build/Buy hardware for a custom router (Atom system, or I recall back in the day some people use to sell small ATX-like boards just for embedded linux to run as a router)

So what option would you go with and why? And if the DIY route should I try to get some hardware that is pre made for the job or DYI like a Atom machine.

I even kicked around the idea of getting a beefy NAS, throwing on ESXi and running the router and NAS in one box but then it hit me that was a dumb idea :P

Answer 1

I find that while consumer routers fit their job well, there are still a number of jobs for which they are unsuitable due to a lack of processing power, storage space, or both. Moving these jobs to a dedicated server is just as much overkill. Since I love tinkering and playing around with this kind of thing, there was only one real route to go.

A year ago I rolled my own solution, using options #2 and #3 (mostly old parts, bought a new micro-atx motherboard and case to fit it in a nice package), and have been really happy with it. If you think DD-WRT or Tomato is powerful, wait until you have a system which can support pfSense or m0n0wall. I have similar qualms about the power consumption though, and have been planning to repurpose that system as a media PC (my router really doesn't need to be able to decode 1080p ;P ) and buy something like the fit-PC2 Diskless and add a hardrive to serve as a router. Depending on your needs, such a project can easily double as a NAS or print server, should have plenty of processing power to do fun tricks like Upside-Down-Ternet as well. Because of the way internet access is set up at the apartments where I live, I had particular fun setting the router up as a multi-homed outgoing load-balancer, allowing me to push well over 30Mbits where I should only have access to 3Mbits with the help of a little netgraph magic.

While this option was far from the cheapest, it has provided countless fun since I started, and the advantage to being a custom PC instead of a consumer package is as new technology comes out, I can upgrade instead of buying a whole new device.

Answer 2

DD-WRT still couldn't handle the requirements of my flat, 6 of us all on a 50meg connection, all the routers we'd been given with dd-wrt or standard netgear or d-link OS would, after an hour slow us to less than 1meg with a ping of over 2s. A housemate had a spare old pc, and I had a spare NIC, setup pfsense... the rest is history been getting 40meg (still disappointing about 10meg loss, but far better than any standart router had given us). Once we have a HDD to put in it will probably run ipfire, or maybe gentoo(unconventional yes but can install a torrent server on the machine therefore reducing work done by our network.).