The man has failed us.

Latest Vault 7 leak, CherryBlossom, details how the intelligence community is actively working to ensure you stay on a short leash while on the internet. TP-Link and many other vendors no longer allow custom firmware. ALIX routers are the answer. relatively inexpensive, can include wireless from USB or PCI, and can be mounted in a weatherproof enclosure. http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/sc.8/category.19/.f open firmware, while becoming increasingly less reliable on commercial offerings, can be found here and is 100% supported as this system is a generic x86 low power board: https://openwrt.org/

>>343 You can buy multi-nic fanless PCs powerful enough to run a full featured pfsense or opnsense setup. I buy Partaker, Chinese brand but seems reliable.

>>343 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ledv33t6SNE

I've got a couple Alix boards for experimenting with B.A.T.M.A.N. I also got the clearfog from solid-run, but haven't bothered getting it working yet, as it doesn't come with any OS or even a bootloader installed, and it gets obscenely hot under no load. I got the bootloader installed over tftp, but got bored with it and started playing with my alix again. I'll proabably play with it some more this weekend.

I started this thread about a month ago, so i figured id keep it going. Open source home networking is an absolute essential in this foul year of our lord 2017. it will not come cheap, so heres my router build and justification for the parts. all builds are Gentoo with arno-iptables-firewall. 1. Micro ITX board: these are cheap, between 20-50 USD, and vastly more powerful than any off-the-shelf commercial hardware (linksys,etc..) 2. AMD processor: Intel has a colorful history of poisoning the watering hole for its own benefit and benefit of the state. AMD is less expensive, and has more than enough horsepower. the AM3 processor specifically, as it flopped, is offered at a deep discount. we arent virtualizing, so 2 cores is fine. 3. 4gb RAM unused ram is wasted ram, and our nics have dedicated buffer ram anyhow. we'll be running Gentoo on this router because low quality internet memes never die. 4. 30-60gb SSD Cheap, and still extraordinarily more powerful than off-the-shelf garbage from nutgear/linksuck. we want this in case we're interested in squid proxies to lower the price of our monopolistic internet. 5. Dedicated AP. This part....is ugly. Technologies like Beam shaping, MiMO, 80211AC, and for many chips even master mode in linux are just not where they need to be. if you want anything more than 20-30mbit over your wlan, you need to buy a dedicated AP. 6. dual realtek nic card: $15 and, again, not intel. this gives us 1 onboard uplink, and 2 PCI "lan/wifi" interfaces if we want. expand if you need to a 5-48 port switch, but remember, this is just home networking so lets not get too crazy. Why not PI: you can easily exhaust your ram with packet switching, buffering, or just throughput as the pi does not have a dedicated buffer pool for the nic. the pi is designed to be networked, not to become the network. Wireless performance is ok, but not good enough for an apartment full of hackers. the drawbacks of your own router box: Power: if electricity is a concern then commodity stuff will always win. then again, you're looking at building a router with an ACPI sleep ability... Price: even the cheapest build is going to run about 260USD but...lets compare what we're getting. Commercial Garbage(TM)(C): the most expensive linksys router is $300 and is largely marketing excess. no one needs 1.6gbit ethernet when the uplink in most homes is under 300mbit. the netgear nighthawk is a jaw dropping $430 router with planned obsolescence and no upgrade paths. it only comes with 512MB of ram...so our router has 8 times that. our router has 6 USB ports, theirs has 2. Netgear boasts 7.6 gigabit wireless which is...laughable and unproven.

sadly libre options like https://www.crowdsupply.com/lime-micro/limenet are failing their crowdfunding campaigns. Although there is the Turris Omnia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEscTeRZdg

>>419 If you're concerned about firmware, aren't the AMD microcode and SSD firmware problems?

>>424 I like the omnia, it just needs more distribution. Amazon in the states needs it, for example. >>426 I suppose it comes down to the devil you know. the firmware in SSD'd can be mitigated by choosing an off-brand vendor, and the AMD microcode while still certainly an issue has not shown to be openly in bed with 3 letter agencies. Intel has a history of lying to customers about performance, goosing performance numbers with intel-only compilers, and screwing with code standards and practices to benefit intel and punish rivals. AMD is a worthy underdog thats released source code for a number of their products.

>>428 AMD is basically the only GPU vendor that actually cares about its open-source drivers.

>>343 I've run pfsense, ddwrt, bsd, and I think one time some proprietary application firewall off an ALIX at home. Worked great. Had PCI slots for wifi as well if I wanted to make it an AP