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Anyone Ever Made a Homemade Router or Switch?

Sylice

Just wondering, is it even possible? I was going to for my senior project-- but then the senior project for my class was cancelled.

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Comments

Asif Dasl

Look at Mikrotik, I'm not a network guy but I've heard their performance to cost ratio wipes the competition. Downside? It's a little do-it-yourself which you could view as a good thing or a bad thing depending on your viewpoint. Think Raspberry Pi but for routers and wireless hardware.

RouterBoard.com : Products

JDMurray

You can make a router from a PC motherboard or Virtual Machine with multiple NICs and running free router/firewall software. I've had very good luck with Vyatta Core running in VMware, but I don't know how well the Open Source release of Vyatta is supported.

Plantwiz

Played with ClarkConnect several years back (OMG, it has been a very long time). Has some potential!

paul78

There are actually many Linux and BSD based router and firewall distros if you don't want to build one from scratch. From a learning/project point of view - you may want to consider explore building a Linux based router from scratch. I would recommend starting with BuildRoot to build the base OS. Buildroot: making embedded Linux easy

You didn't really share the level of experience that you have so if you want to just use a router distro that's already out there - several to consider include:

The ever popular - Open WRT - https://openwrt.org/
The of fork of Linux Router Project - LEAF isn't active any more but still relevant - LEAF — Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall
I came across Mikrotik/RouterOS a while back but never installed it - MikroTik Routers and Wireless: Downloads

I personally use M0n0wall since is BSD based - more of a firewall platform but has basic static routing features - m0n0wall

A comprehensive list of others here - List of router and firewall distributions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

wes allen

You should look at what you can do with a raspberry pi and routing.

it_consultant

Sylice wrote: »

Just wondering, is it even possible? I was going to for my senior project-- but then the senior project for my class was cancelled.

Check to see if this would be an acceptable project. Setting up a linux (or even Windows based) router is really very simple and may not be appropriately challenging for a senior project. I would expect a project like this in intro to Linux or something.