So I wanted to try out configuring one of my old machines to be used for routing and firewall so that I get more advanced capabilities.
At this point I did not venture into making my router a wireless router primarily due to poor support of drivers in Linux for wireless.
So the setup needs an old pc,2 nic cards., knoppix cd/dvd and free hard drive or a usb drive.
I used some of the tools like the ones listed below

1. FWBuilder :  For writing iptables as iptables is really cryptic and I had no energy/motivation to learn it in detail.Even using FWbuiler there is definitely a learning curve and currently it does not do advanced features like QoS etc.
2. Vnstat : For bandwidth monitoring.Now I could have used MRTG but both these software serve different purposes.In mycase since Im with Comcast and now they have bandwidth caps I was interested in aggregated statitistics like uploads/downloads per day etc as I use my internet to donate my bandwiidth for legal purposes.
3. ddclient : I use this perl script to upate my Dynamic DNS at Dyndns.org.

Overall I was very pleased with the outcome as I feel that if you run Bittorrent and other tools/software which excercises your router to the fullest , most of the cheap routers of D-Link/Linksys/Airlink do choke as I doubt it that they have enough memory to handle the load which is put by Bittorrent and other p2p software.
I put the wireless router as an access point and now my wireless does not drop too much.

posted at: 15:38 | category: /worklog | permanent link to this entry