Anyone ever build their own router to increase speed?

[M0rph2020 5]

I was wondering if anyone has built their own router or has anyone seen a tutorial on the net? I was curious I only get a max speed of maybe 7 mb on my asus n66u. I would like to increase my speed to as much as possible on openvpn for downloading and uploading. Thanks in Advance

[zhang888 1066]

Yes, the TP-Link WDR4900 has a PPC architecture and 800Mhz clock. That means a much better AES performance that is very critical for VPNs.

 

The SSL benchmarks here show a dramatic speed improve over other "home" routers:

 

http://wiki.openwrt.org/inbox/benchmark.openssl

 

 

Install OpenWRT on a WDR4900 and you will reach ~15Mbit using AirVPN.

[pfSense_fan 181]

Yes, I built my pfSense firewall / router using PC equipment. I can get 100 Mbit+. I am limited by my internet connection, not my router.

 

There is a tutorial on this site, however I found it to be missing some info and confusing. I have been writing my own that I hope to release in late April. I'm very busy unfortunately.

 

Although you can use pretty much any pc equipment, I recommend server class equipment if your main use is VPN and you can afford it. Some server motherboards have 4 high end Intel NIC's built onto the board (saves a lot of money this way, many network cards are not compatible, server class intell work the best, pci-e cards are quite expensive) as well as have encryption instructions in the processors, mainly Ivy Bridge and the new Haswell Xeon. You can build one this way for $500-$600 depending if you have a spare hard drive, power supply and case around. If you do have those, all you need is the motherboard, processor and memory. I used an old laptop drive and a power supply and case from a pc that I no longer used.

 

 

http://www.pfsense.org/

 

[Lee47 23]

Just in case you want to check out that other tutorial its listed here:

 

https://airvpn.org/topic/10213-installing-a-pfsense-box-with-airvpn/

 

Many tried it any found it working, for myself it was only half working and had issues sometimes... I would however suggest to wait for pfsense_fans guide which will be better and working.

 

Spending that money on an pricey router is pointless as I found out like yourself, pfsense + diy router is the best route for speed and stability. Even the newer netgear router with dual core 1ghz has its fair share of issues and is new and lacks the features and performance of pfsense which is free.

[M0rph2020 5]

Thank you for the replys. I believe the pfsense box is the direction I want to go. Just trying to figure out what hardware I need before I build the box.

[zanegrey 0]

Actually I just did this.  The drive was that I was sick of poor configurability of ddwrt and friends and my linksys wrt was actually a bottle neck to my isp!  Built a small haswell box with a mini itx mobo.  I was going to use pfsense but when I started in Feburary they were a bit behind in drivers and my nic cards (Intel) were not supported.  Ended up installing Arch Linux on it and setting up everything from scratch using shorewall as the firewall.  Its stupid fast and a way overspecced router.  My recommendation to someone else would be to only go this route if you wanted to learn and do not care about spending a bit more than a typical router --- think 400 compared to 100 bucks.  The end result, however is pretty slick. 

[pfSense_fan 181]

Actually I just did this.  The drive was that I was sick of poor configurability of ddwrt and friends and my linksys wrt was actually a bottle neck to my isp!  Built a small haswell box with a mini itx mobo.  I was going to use pfsense but when I started in Feburary they were a bit behind in drivers and my nic cards (Intel) were not supported.  Ended up installing Arch Linux on it and setting up everything from scratch using shorewall as the firewall.  Its stupid fast and a way overspecced router.  My recommendation to someone else would be to only go this route if you wanted to learn and do not care about spending a bit more than a typical router --- think 400 compared to 100 bucks.  The end result, however is pretty slick. 

 

pfSense 2.1.1 has the updated drivers to support i210 and i354 nics. I use an ASRock server board with quad Intel i210.