Building your own router?

[blacknight]

Has anyone any experience of building their own router?

I keep meaning to do something with the IPs that I have, but I need a router to use them.

[anoble66]

no, but i am sure you can do it with Linux or a windows machine and a NIC that supports VLAN tagging or just use a few different NIC's... but, i wouldnt really want to rely on a server to perform routing, its not going to be very efficient.

Why not just buy a cheap L3 switch, eg 3COM, Dell etc.

[blacknight]

Why wouldn't it be efficient?

[anoble66]

because a "real" L3 switch or routers primary focus is to route packets as fast as it can, a windows or linux machine adapted to route between subnets is never going to be as good. For example, have you ever tried pushing a server NIC on Windows past 350MB/s? It doesnt like it at all, Linux will be a little better but its still a compromise.

Suppose if you just want to route between a few subnets on a basic enough network then a linux box will do the job, if your needing to run any routing protocols etc then i would just buy a dedicate L3 switch or router.

[blacknight]

Sounds like complete overkill for a home network

[anoble66]

you never specified in your question that this was for a home network, so yeah, it would be overkill but what would be the point of subnetting an internal home network in the first place?

[blacknight]

I've got a load of routable IPs, so I don't want to use NAT

[anoble66]

Dont understand how NAT comes into it, usually NAT is used to translate between your private subnets to either a public IP address (PAT) or to a pool of public ip addresses, or you can just translate between private subnets but this is only really used for large companys that are merging and dont want to have to renumber.

Guess I am just finding it difficult to understand why you actually want to route in your home network or use NAT.

[bryn_ie]

you don't need a router, just a hub, a hub'll cost you a 15bucks.

All you need to do is assign the ip address you have each machine and plug them into the hub and the hub into the radio. You only need a router if you want to use one public ip address and have multiple computers, thus sharing the connection.

You'll need to firewall each machine though, for security reasons

[blacknight]

Now I'm even more confused

Basically I have an allocation of public IPs ie. more than one
My understanding was that to use them I would need to have some form of router, as I have one connection..

[bryn_ie]

Nope, Just a hub. As you have public IP addresses any traffic coming to from each machine will have a unique address, globally, as in no one else in the world should have the address. You all you need is to split the connection so it's available to each machine. Each pc will get the data but it will only be looked at by the pc which has the ip to which it's sent

A router will share one public ip address between many pcs on the private side (yours) of the network, when data comes back it looks like it's for the router, but the router knows it's for a pc inside the private netwrok so forwards it on to the right pc

[chopper]

A router will share one public ip address between many pcs on the private side (yours) of the network, when data comes back it looks like it's for the router, but the router knows it's for a pc inside the private netwrok so forwards it on to the right pc

AFAIK routers operate as Hosts that screen traffic between networks ... If you setup a router it implies that two or more networks are used ... however traffic between these networks maybe bridged together transparently or subjected to screening for some ghastly purpose ( usually to stop people playing counterstrike games thru a router host ) ...

so building your router may involve screening OR if you choose not to you would setup unscreened subnetwork using all of your ips on each host with hub plugged onto the internet terminated network

Why choose one over the other is dn important question !

[bryn_ie]

The router may indeed firewall traffic.

As I said, if you have public ip addresses all you need is a 15 euro hub.

plug each pc into a port, give each a public ip address and plug the up port on the hub into the internet connection. Away you go.

[spud]

this is the way mine is set up i have 2 ips one for the pc and one for the wireless router running an xbox360 and 2 laptops, hub pc router works a treet