D.I.Y Router
Re-use old hardware together with fli4l to build an awesome router.
Categories: Hardware
Another day another problem. We planned to increase the available bandwidth in our office to 16mbit. This required an upgrade to ADSL2, not a major problem, or so I thought.
We were still making use of the ADSL router/modem solution from the internet provider we were with several years back and due to the age of the device it did not support ADSL2. We since have switched providers and received a new modem as part of our upgrade to ADSL2. However the new box was modem only, and we obviously need a router for the Office. So of I went to find a suitable device.
We run several services for our roadwarriors out of our office I.T. room, so port forwarding is a MUST have feature for us. I was absolutly suprised that I was unable to find a suitably priced router solution which supported port forwarding, even calling around to the sales guys from netgear and d-link was a disappointment. We purchased devices from both companies only to find that we were not able to do true port mapping, and sent them back.
The routers we sent back only supported what is called virtual servers which is almost what we wanted but not really. We have several web servers that all must run on port 80 within the intranet but also must be accessible from the outside world (obviously with a different port outside per webserver.) The virtual server feature only allows the mapping of incoming requests for fixed port to a different IP on the same port. What a bummer.
So what where we to do? Our old hardware solved the port mapping issue (strange that such an old router had a better feature set than all current offerings we looked at.) but we where not getting the 16mbit goodness from our ADSL2 line.
One of my tech guys stumbled upon an excellent solution called,
fli4l. The software is a free linux based router solution that fits onto a single floppy disk, the freaky thing is that the fli4l server only requires a single networkcard to do it's routing magic. Most excellent.
Our new router can be seen in the middle, the modem is directly connected by the
yellow cable on the bottom switch.
First we configured the fli4l floppy disk, included is not only an excellent web interface, but also a cool monitoring client that now runs on my linux desktop. An old dell laptop with broken TFT and keyboard would be put back to use as our new router. We hooked the modem up directly to our switch connected and connected the laptop to the same switch (remeber only one network card), wacked in the fli4l floppy and bam we had a working solution pretty much out of the box. I LIKE
check it out here:
http://www.fli4l.de
We were still making use of the ADSL router/modem solution from the internet provider we were with several years back and due to the age of the device it did not support ADSL2. We since have switched providers and received a new modem as part of our upgrade to ADSL2. However the new box was modem only, and we obviously need a router for the Office. So of I went to find a suitable device.
We run several services for our roadwarriors out of our office I.T. room, so port forwarding is a MUST have feature for us. I was absolutly suprised that I was unable to find a suitably priced router solution which supported port forwarding, even calling around to the sales guys from netgear and d-link was a disappointment. We purchased devices from both companies only to find that we were not able to do true port mapping, and sent them back.
The routers we sent back only supported what is called virtual servers which is almost what we wanted but not really. We have several web servers that all must run on port 80 within the intranet but also must be accessible from the outside world (obviously with a different port outside per webserver.) The virtual server feature only allows the mapping of incoming requests for fixed port to a different IP on the same port. What a bummer.
So what where we to do? Our old hardware solved the port mapping issue (strange that such an old router had a better feature set than all current offerings we looked at.) but we where not getting the 16mbit goodness from our ADSL2 line.
One of my tech guys stumbled upon an excellent solution called,
fli4l. The software is a free linux based router solution that fits onto a single floppy disk, the freaky thing is that the fli4l server only requires a single networkcard to do it's routing magic. Most excellent.
Our new router can be seen in the middle, the modem is directly connected by the
yellow cable on the bottom switch.
First we configured the fli4l floppy disk, included is not only an excellent web interface, but also a cool monitoring client that now runs on my linux desktop. An old dell laptop with broken TFT and keyboard would be put back to use as our new router. We hooked the modem up directly to our switch connected and connected the laptop to the same switch (remeber only one network card), wacked in the fli4l floppy and bam we had a working solution pretty much out of the box. I LIKE
check it out here:
http://www.fli4l.de
fli4l
Posted by marcel at 6:18 AM | Link | 0 comments
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