Project Goals

• Build an epic wireless router/firewall. (preferring OSHW and requiring OSS)
• It should be cheap enough to provide to family and friends.

I’ve been on the hunt for the perfect home router platform for a while. There was a time when I thought it would be best to have my HTPC, NAS, WAP, router and firewall needs all provided by the same machine. I’ve since concluded that putting all your eggs in one basket is often not the best choice.

For one, lots of work, by very intelligent and specialized individuals, has been put into different OSs and distributions that are tailored to excel at a certain task. I see no reason to throw all that expertise away.

Second, the software packages needed to fulfil my needs are diverse, but also conflicting. For example, having a GUI, bleeding-edge HTPC software or an experimental file system running on a router/firewall should make anyone cringe. Of course, a reboot bringing down the whole house is rather annoying as well.

Finally, even if I was okay with all of those drawbacks, my second goal puts a cap on how expensive said device can be. The hardware required to be the end-all-be-all home computer would be prohibitively expensive to try and provide to all my family and friends that I support.

This post is still being written, more to come…