How do I create a wireless linux router from a spare server?

Question

I'm going to be doing some experiments with network traffic sniffing and I would like to setup a linux box as my home router. Are there any really easy ways to do this and have a web-configurable panel like a commodity router? I found a link for ClarkConnect, but no in-depth HOWTOs.

Answer 1

You could use pfSense it has many features:

• Firewall
• Network Address Translation (NAT)
• Redundancy
• Load Balancing Reporting and Monitoring

• RRD Graphs

  The RRD graphs in pfSense maintain historical information on the following.

  • CPU utilization
  • Total throughput
  • Firewall states
  • Individual throughput for all interfaces
  • Packets per second rates for all interfaces
  • WAN interface gateway(s) ping response times
  • Traffic shaper queues on systems with traffic shaping enable
• VPN
  • IPsec
  • PPTP
  • OpenVPN

• Dynamic DNS

  Through:

  • DynDNS
  • DHS
  • DyNS
  • easyDNS
  • No-IP
  • ODS.org
  • ZoneEdit
• Captive Portal
• DHCP Server and Relay

It has a nice, easy to use web-based configuration, just look at the screen-shots.

There are also some nice tutorials.

Best of all you can build it yourself with commodity hardware, and it's Open Source.

Answer 2

There are several distros capable of this.

• Pfsense
• DD-WRT
• IPcop