Along with the nagging networking connectivity problems (apparently thanks to Road Runner) at home, I’m thinking of changing how our home network is laid out. I’m seeking more control and a different setup than what I get from our DD-WRT-based router.
I have been looking at Tomato, a replacement router firmware alternative to DD-WRT, but I don’t know if that’s the ultimate direction I want to move in yet. (I personally like that Tomato’s Web site runs on Drupal; I can tell by the URLs.)
We have an old PC that isn’t doing anything, and would work well enough as a router appliance. I’ve had the idle thought that I should find a “live CD” of something that would let me use it for our router; the ability to run from a live CD seems attractive to me.
Sthomas pointed out PFsense, a FreeBSD-based firewall software package that he and his roommates use. Its features and capabilities look quite good — and it is designed to be run from read-only CD media with settings stored on a floppy disk or USB flash drive.
PFSense won in a recent Cult of Linux blog shootout between seven different Linux/BSD firewalls.
One concern I have regarding switching to a full-fledged albeit old computer for my router is the power consumption of that computer. If it’s running all the time, it seems like it would have to draw more power than the Linksys WRT-54G hardware I currently use.