Modern home networking.

[tyggerjai]

Back in the day, of course, the cable that came out of our modem or cable modem or whatever went straight into a Linux box with various packet filtering stuff ( unless you were a rhesus monkey, and come to think of it, the original lioness was OpenBSD). These days, I suspect, no-one bothers, we just buy smarter ADSL modems in the first place. Is that the case, oh geeks? Has the wrt54g rendered the home gateway obsolete?

Comments

[tyggerjai]

Oh, and of course the openwrt firmware gives the IPv6 stuff. Hmmm.

[jeamland]

The trick being finding an OpenWRT-capable device that supports ADSL and WiFi. The WiFi situation is pretty much sorted with the Broadcom-based units like the NB6 but there's no driver for the ADSL core in the Broadcom chips. The only units I could find that had OpenWRT support for ADSL and WiFi were the AR7-based devices but they're both no longer on the market and their WiFi support was flakey, at least according to reports.

The only FOSSgeek solution that really works at the moment is to get the cheapest ADSL-capable device you can find, whack it in bridge mode and run it into something running the OS of your choice and getting it to talk PPPoE. Given I've got the NB6 (gateway + 802.11g), an AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and a Sipura SPA3000 (VoIP) clustered around my phone point I didn't really want to add extra boxes.

The other facet is that I've grown averse to blowing spare time dicking around with things when I feel I don't need to. Part of that is reflected in me being a Mac geek these days (no more Xorg.conf, wpa_supplicant.conf, hunting specific driver sources, etc, etc, etc) but also being quite happy to use devices like the NB6 et al instead of hand-rolling kit like I used to. The potentially strange thing is that I'm not overly upset by this. I used to care about it but now I have other things I want to work on and mucking around with those things would just take time away from those.

[tyggerjai]

I have a wrt54g in storage that's running openwrt (or sveasoft, or one of those) and was certainly doing wifi just fine, but I wasn't running it as an ADSL router after the firmware change, so I can't swear to it. It was an older one - the new one I got in china wouldn't take the new firmware, apparently.

And yes, I hear you on the spare time thing. It's like jwz's rants on Linux from whenever it was "Getting the foo card to work with bar isn't exciting. It's a solved problem", etc. Give me shit that works so I can do the stuff I want to do.

[jeamland]

The problem isn't running PPPoE, it's supporting the actual ADSL controller. Most of the devices on the market at the moment are built around chipsets from either Atheros or Broadcom and from memory (may be utterly wrong) Broadcom is either the only one with a combo WiFi/ADSL set or is at least the clear leader in terms of units out there. The chipsets are all built as a MIPS core with a RAM controller, ethernet MAC, USB controller, WiFi MAC and optional ADSL controller. All the devices run Linux, generally, but Broadcom at least don't have source available for their ADSL driver module and nobody's reverse engineered it yet.

Interestingly (he said, going off on a tangent) the ADSL chipset market is utterly dominated by these router-aimed chipsets to the point where you basically can't get any other ADSL controllers at that price point. So a company I did some work for a while back who had a PCI card that did ADSL1 rolled their ADSL2 card around one of the router chipsets with the ethernet MAC wired straight into a second PCI-based ethernet MAC and the host system just sees it as an ethernet interface.

[tyggerjai]

Fascinating...

But long story short, modern ADSL modem/routers basically do everything one would need for home firewall stuff.

[jeamland]

Yep. The NB6 will even let you get to a shell prompt via telnet if you ask nicely. I have no idea how long any hand-done config tweaks will last if you frob via the web interface or reboot though. It's all fairly standard stuff under the hood.