Not too long ago, I was having trouble with a router. Then, out of the blue, someone gave me an Eee PC in perfectly working order. Guess what...

Now I wonder what my best choice would be:

* IPFire?
* Plain Debian (which runs on my desktop) configured as a router?
* Ubuntu running off a bootable USB stick?
* Something else?

What do you think? I've never really done something like this.

Add pfSense to your choices.

1 members found this post helpful.

I recently made a router out of a little cheap x86 PC. Its a bit of a challenge for the networking noob, but its really cool and very fast; especially if you setup a DNS cache and use a web proxy for caching. An atom processor like that should be able to hand it plus some other pretty basic tasks like a print server or a samba drive.

If you are going to use a firewall though, my vote goes out to iptables. It comes pre bundled in many distros, is incrediably powerful and very flexible. Bit of a learning curve, but there are tons of guides for it and there is lots of cool stuff you can do with it (for example I use iptables to redirect traffic to my web proxy port, making my web proxy transparent).

1 members found this post helpful.

never used it but heard good things of smoothwall.

1 members found this post helpful.

For my linux router I use

ubuntu server 14.04 LTS
iptables
ISC-DHCP - DHCP server
Bind9 - DNS cache
squid3 - proxy server

Note: If you want wireless broadcast support (with WEP2 and SSID and all that) then you need to use a select set of wireless card/adapters - the one on the EEEPc might work but chances are you will have to buy a USB stick or a get a wireless AP.

1 members found this post helpful.