linux box as a router
 

I know linux can perform well working as a router, even on older hardwre, and I've been considering doing this, but can't decide if it's really worth spending more electricity and wasting more space at my computer desk. I'd like it to be a sort of fileserver for me, sharing disks via samba and nfs. But not a lot of share access is going to be going on, so I don't think it'd give my routing stuff any performance issues normally. How much more electricity would I spend running another computer as opposed to just my linksys router? keep in mind this pc will be headless, or connected to an LCD via a KVM switch.

Also, how would I add wireless to the linux setup? Could I just pick up a PCI 802.11g card from CircuitCity or something and share it in the router setup just as i would eth1? Perhaps there's a better way?

I actually run a linux box as a router/file server my self. Compared to electricity costs i would assume the comptuer uses slightly more but its not much compared to your refrigerator :P

Linux works great for doing this kind of thing even if you do load it with alot of file shareing things :)

I have aloso had wireless setup on that server to give a kind of wireless access but i would recommend trying to get an access point cause ad-hoc connections are horrible for stablity

On my electic bill i notice maybe a 2 or 3 dollor increase running 2 linux computers all the time 24/7 <-- your millage may very depending on the costs for electiric in your area.


My server is currently running slackware 10
166mhz
2gb primary system drive with 700mb free for my own file shareing fun NFS :)
94mb ram
2 nics <-- removed the wireless when i moved there and added an access point but at the time there was 3 and yes internet worked perfectly on the wireless and the internal lan <-- i still have the script that made this possible and it does include a firewall but i was rooted using this with ssh turned on so its possibly insecure.
40gb harddrive for my cousins windows crap shared though samba
apache for internet web space <-- this is really for screwing with it :P
dns/dhcp server
dhcpcd client for internet connection end


I would be happy to send you any information that you needed to get something like this setup.

A Linksys WRT54G wireless router specs say 1amp @ 12VDC which is about .15 amps @ 120VAC. A small PC will probably be 2-3 amps @ 120VAC. Converting that to $ would be about $1.50 /month more to run my PC vs a hardware router based on being powered 24/7.

You would need to add a wireless access point or replace your existing router with something like the Linksys and then forward the fileserver stuff to another PC.

From reading another post, it looks like it may be possible to use a wifi card with a prism chipset as an access point. I'd really rather do this than buy an access point. Now that it looks like electricity costs won't be that big of a deal, I'd still like to reduce the number of boxes sitting around.

You can use "some" wireless cards as access points if they support the master mode. I would really check first tho. I know the one i had dident :)