So I've got the s***s with my router and short of buying something like a splurging out on a decent cisco box, I've decided to piece together and build my own router.

I've put this together around the following requirements (mroe important to least),
- As much all in one as possible, I don't really want to have to have a small box and a switch and an ata adapter for the phone etc
- As small and low power as possible
- Expandability
- ADSL2+
- VOIP with pstn failover
- Wireless 802.11g
- Booting off a low latency memory device (cf, flash on module etc)
- Space for storage drive
- As passively cooled as possible, given the above

This leads to the following specific hardware requirements,
- 2 x PCI slots, 1 for adsl card, 1 for voip card
- 2+ built in ethernet ports
- either mini-pci or extra internal usb headers for wireless access
- 1 x ide or 2 x sata (preferrably 2 x sata for storage drive and/or slim dvd)
- Internal usb headers
- Preferrably something with a little more grunt to handle the load of torrents, firewall, nat and qos in one

The hardware I've selected so far is here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pFjx0hDk1scJoFsQnEoKFbg

Reasoning behind hardware,
- Mobo - This is what I've based most of my stuff around, mainly because of the low power requirement of the atom cpu, but also the functionality and bit more beef behind it, has almost all of the needed requirements of the expandability to include everything
- Case - Small, has pci ports and dual rise, as well as decent capacity for extra drives and included psu with 80w adapter
- The rest sort of falls in place around the case and mobo, only thing I'm majorly concerned about is the wireless card and getting it supported in master mode under linux, as well as playing around with asterisk or another free voip pbx solution which I haven't had much experience with

Anyone have any thoughts or input as to what I've selected? Looking for anyone who has had a bit more experience or knowledge in dealing with mini itx solutions as to what is good, not good and what else is out there.

seems like a lot of effort and money when you could just buy a decent home router

http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=460611

I have one myself (the previous model), works well but its been in the draw ever since I got my cisco

wanna buy it?

sounds like a stupid idea to me, 7404VGP+NAS=win. If you really want a torrent client separate to your pc, scrap the nas and just hook up an old laptop via ethernet, and chuck on a few external drives for storage.

last edited by MrHardware at 12:42:57 12/Feb/09

I'll just highlight one of my requirements:

- Expandability

You can't expand on a "decent home router". I guess I'm not so much after one of those as I am after a decent home system. Like a media centre, I could go by a cheap popcorn hour or I could (and did) put together a media system which does a hell of a lot more. I would be using it for quite a bit more than standard home use and I've even seen the best home routers die under the load of heavy torrents of file transfers across the lan.

imo keep home entertainment & internet connectivity completely separate

what software are you going to use????

What I would do is buy Decent Router without VOIP but has QOS... One of the Billion Wireless N routers...

Then buy a Siemans C470 IP Phone
http://gigaset.com/shc/0,1935,hq_en_0_145510_rArNrNrNrN,00.html

The quality of these are much better then ATA... We have been using them at work and they are great!!! also do PSTN as well, supports up to 6 VSP

You can also hookup other DECT phones to it... even though they are not IP phones... they will just use the default VSP...

I believe you will be very happy with the setup...


last edited by TiT at 13:36:25 12/Feb/09

You can't expand on a "decent home router"

Well, that depends on what you call a 'home router'.
Is a Cisco 1841 an ISR?
You could certainly do it with a 28x1, though you won't get a torrent client on a Cisco box.

Personally I'd go looking for a HTPC case and mobo with two NICs (or an additional card), run it up with FreeBSD/asterisk.

imo keep home entertainment & internet connectivity completely separate

That's why I have a media centre and this is a new pc.

what software are you going to use????

Ideally I'd like to try a bsd variant, maybe do my own playing around with pf, maybe even try m0n0wall, mainly cuz I've never got much of a chance to play around with bsd at all. However I think I will go with probably end up going with something like smoothwall and ipcop, then throwing asterisk into the mix. Was even thinking of just a base debian netinst and doing all the config myself. Open to suggestion if anyone has ever played around with anything like these (I haven't really, going off what I've read).

I don't really want to get into buying voip based phones, already have a decent pstn based wireless one which is totally adequate, as well as mobile phones with sip clients + wireless to register back to asterisk.

Well, that depends on what you call a 'home router'.

Home router being $200 wireless voip inclusing 4 port thingy. I could go for a full integrated cisco solution, which would probably be nice, but I would prefer something I can have a bit more of a tinket with (and preferrably something I could play around with bsd/linux on).

Personally I'd go looking for a HTPC case and mobo with two NICs (or an additional card), run it up with FreeBSD/asterisk.

Kinda what I'm doing...

seems like a bit of a crazy idea, you are paying alot to get it all in one box, when seperate devices could do what you want and probably better.

Also mobo fail, everything is down, no internet, no phone. no nothing.

If anything at least leave the ADSL modem out of it, just get a normal adsl modem router and bridge it, so if things go to s*** with the server, you could have internet up and running pretty quick.

Also, is the device going to be the Wireless access point? That might be a pain, I know there isnt much sofware for making a windows wireless device an AP, maybe there is with linux.

seems like a bit of a crazy idea, you are paying alot to get it all in one box, when seperate devices could do what you want and probably better.

That's the thing, I'm not really convinced a bundle of seperate devices could do what I want better. For example, how could a small ata sip adapter do better than a full blown modular fxo+fxs asterisk based pbx voip system? How could a smaller lower speed cpu and memory capacity deal with a large tcpip connection pool from heavy torrenting and internal file sharing?

Also mobo fail, everything is down, no internet, no phone. no nothing.

Mobo fail, no power, etc could happen with anything. I believe with no power the voip card is just a dumb pstn forwarder so any phone plugged in will still have power and dialtone from the pstn line. That's my only main concern here and I've sent a query to the manufacturer regarding this (might have to spend a bit more on a less generic card).

If anything at least leave the ADSL modem out of it, just get a normal adsl modem router and bridge it, so if things go to s*** with the server, you could have internet up and running pretty quick.

Good point and I've got an old dlink dsl502t collecting dust that I will be using for exactly this if s*** hits the fan but I don't want to have to use it permanently.

Also, is the device going to be the Wireless access point? That might be a pain, I know there isnt much sofware for making a windows wireless device an AP, maybe there is with linux.

Another good point, this will be a pain but there is software for linux and bsd which will support putting different types (depending on chipset) into "master mode" (ie, access point mode). The usb one ive got will apparently do this.

personally, it sounds like a 'why buy a car for $20k when i can build a kit car thats worse for $100k'

I can understand why, it's fun to tinker and play with these things. I used to do it way back broadband when you had to compile IP masquerade in with the kernel for NAT'ing on dial up. Then did it with DSL, then did it with Smoothwall, ClarkConnect and so on..

Nowadays, my time is too valuable to waste configuring this crap so I have a Billion that does it all - more porn^H^H^H^H movie watching for me.

I'd stick with a basic ADSL router and then put a small linux box behind it for the rest. That way if your box dies, you've at least still got internet access.

For size/power I'd look at getting a EEE-box, or a Nova p20 for it and run linux/asterisk/etc on it. You'd need to use an external SIP/PSTN converter like an SPA3k if you want to run a analogue line into it, if you just want PSTN phones, then a PAP2 should be sufficient.

either the eeebox or novap20 would be okay to run as a router as well if you want. The p20 has two ethernets ( if you get the dock ) and wireless. perfect!

yeah, i can see it too ticman, i wanted to build a Mini-ITX PC once too, and realised that i could get one for half the price, with a built in screen, its called a laptop. I had visions of it becoming my firewall/AP/NAS/torrent client all in one, sitting on the top of a shelf, even has a built in UPS (laptop battery) etc. but then i thought, if i just get a billion router, normal pc, external drive and a UPS, i'll have a far better outcome for far, far less hassle, and as you say, time is far to valuable to be wasting on this kind of crap, unless you absolutely have nothing better to do, and as if thats the case, ever.

last edited by MrHardware at 16:04:47 12/Feb/09

just use any pc and buy a dsl bridge
so all you need in yuor box is a nic which does pppoe

You all have valid points, but they're valid mostly based on cost and time. The time is not an issue, unless you're a complete dunce it's not going to take 500000 hours to setup a bare bones linux box and get at least adsl synch. I mean if you've got time to post s*** on qgl it's not like your time is that precious, or far too valuable, in the first place. As far as the cost goes, sure I could probably do what I want in multiple devices and a laptop or another computer for probably half the price, but how does that go down on your power bill? As well as space for everything, cabling, etc. It's not like I'm going to spend untold thousands on this, and it'd be an interesting little project.

I'm not going to go the multiple devices route unless there's a good reason, especially considering it'll most likely last for a good long while.

I mean if you've got time to post s*** on qgl it's not like your time is that precious, or far too valuable, in the first place.

Perhaps a lot of us are in situations where we can post on qgl, but can't create a fridge sized router.

I just bought an EEE box & turned it into a NAS/print server, not sure whether I'll bother with streaming media just yet though so can't comment on that. There's no PCI slots but can you get USB versions of the dsl/voip things you want? Also only has 1 ethernet port.

I did a power test on it and while it's running the box + 1tb USB wd elements drive use ~26 watts of power and make bugger all noise, it's sitting on my desk next to the monitor and I can't even hear it.