Budget router that works well with custom firmware?

[elkstep]

Hi guys,

I've been thinking about picking up a new router to replace my rubbish TalkTalk basic router. I've read a little about custom router firmware and it sounds great! I'm really interested in giving it a go. The problem is, I'm not sure what router I should go for! The functionality I would be looking for is:

• ability to prioritise devices on the network
• wake on LAN
• VPN support

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what router/firmware i should look at? I'm new to all of this (as you can probably tell), but I'd class myself as very computer literate, a bit of a tinkerer, and more than willing to persevere and learn.

If anyone can suggest any other resources on this subject I should check out, that would also be really useful!

Thanks!

[SUMMONER]

Not sure about a custom firmware router, not plaid with Tomato or DD-WRT in quite a while, but a used Draytek Vigor 2830/2830n should fit the bill (using its original stock firmware).

The non-wireless version can be had used for < £40 delivered off FleaBay and the dual band Wireless N version for < £60.

[Biscuit]

As a wildcard suggestion, you could try building a PF sense based router yourself if you have some old PC hardware kicking around.

Best place to find supported devices for the custom firmware options is on their respective forums/help pages. That would be my place to start, see what people recomend, see how much is costs and if its pennies then... why not?

[elkstep]

Not sure about a custom firmware router, not plaid with Tomato or DD-WRT in quite a while, but a used Draytek Vigor 2830/2830n should fit the bill (using its original stock firmware).

The non-wireless version can be had used for < £40 delivered off FleaBay and the dual band Wireless N version for < £60.

Interesting! Thanks, I'll take a look!

As a wildcard suggestion, you could try building a PF sense based router yourself if you have some old PC hardware kicking around.

Best place to find supported devices for the custom firmware options is on their respective forums/help pages. That would be my place to start, see what people recomend, see how much is costs and if its pennies then... why not?

The PF Sense option sounds really promising... the only thing that puts me off slightly is the amount of power it would use compared to a normal router! Also, I've read that the PC card options for wifi aren't great, so that could be a problem...

Do you have any idea if it would be possible to use an old PC to act both as a router and a staging server with a LAMP stack? I'm a freelance web designer/developer by trade, so if this is an option that could be seriously handy for me!

[Biscuit]

The PF Sense option sounds really promising... the only thing that puts me off slightly is the amount of power it would use compared to a normal router! Also, I've read that the PC card options for wifi aren't great, so that could be a problem...

Do you have any idea if it would be possible to use an old PC to act both as a router and a staging server with a LAMP stack? I'm a freelance web designer/developer by trade, so if this is an option that could be seriously handy for me!

I suspect that it's possible, but ill advised due to the fact that you would usually want these things protected by the firewall, rather than built into it... but I'm no expert here so happy bow to someone else's expertise.

[elkstep]

I suspect that it's possible, but ill advised due to the fact that you would usually want these things protected by the firewall, rather than built into it... but I'm no expert here so happy bow to someone else's expertise.

Yeah that figures... Damn. Would have been a great setup for me, two birds with one stone!

Thanks for the advice anyway, I'm going to have a look into PF Sense, watched a few videos and it sounds really powerful!

[Biscuit]

Yeah that figures... Damn. Would have been a great setup for me, two birds with one stone!

Thanks for the advice anyway, I'm going to have a look into PF Sense, watched a few videos and it sounds really powerful!

Once I have finally stopped being lazy and put my unRAID box back into its case, I'll be putting one together with dirt cheap AM1 hardware I already have kicking around.

[DDY]

I've dabbled with PFSense, Tomato, OpenWRT and DDWRT in the past.

Ultimately, I ended up using Gargoyle which is running on my 8 year old Buffalo G300NH.

http://www.gargoyle-router.com/

It's based on OpenWRT.

One of the biggest factors which put me off PFSense was that it was too powerful, in that it was immensely capable but I couldn't find the time nor patience to figure out how to tame it. To some extent I found the same of the other router firmwares, where implementing my bandwidth management strategy required lots of research.

Gargoyle while based on OpenWRT, has its own web frontend which makes bandwidth monitoring and management relatively straightforward. One disadvantage is you lose quite a lot of the more advanced options compared to regular OpenWRT, none of which I miss or understand to be honest .

Reliability is excellent, uptime is currently at 823 days and counting.

My G300NH needs to be upgraded though, it can handle aggressive traffic shaping on my old 8mb/s connection but it now struggles at times on my current 50mb/s connection.

[Biscuit]

I think I have an old D-Link 825 that I could test that on actually. Thanks for the suggestion.