do it your self home router

[Mr_Cool59]

so hear is my problem i am tired of having to buy wireless routers every 2-3 years. I am think of building my own router but unsure on what i should get. Hear is what i am thinking getting a mini itx with 4 lan ports. hear is the reason for 4, one coming from the cable modem, one going to a switch for internal wired networking, one going to a wireless build maybe have not figured out if i should have one for router and one for wireless routing, and the last one connecting to a home server. i hope someone can shed some light on this for me. so i know if that is two much or if i should just get a dual and then run everything from a switch.

[cooper]

Get a dual network ITX and hook up it and all your other home network machines to the switch.

The wireless attaches via USB to the 'router' machine.

The cheapest dual-network ITX I've found here in .nl is the GIGABYTE GA-C1037UN. It comes with a not particularly powerful chip (Celeron 1037U) but seeing it's just going to throw a few packets around it doesn't need to be, plus it takes very little power, has on-board video to at least initially set it up in a friendlier fashion...

Alternatively, get the cheapest Mobo you can find that has just one gigabit network port but also has at least 2 USB2.0 (yes, 2.0 will suffice) ports. Use the gigabit port to attach to the switch and buy a USB ethernet adapter (should be under $10). It'll be a 10/100Mbit adapter rather than gigabit (USB 2.0 can do 500MBit theoretically IIRC so no problems there) but I doubt your internet connection goes over 100MBit and that's what you'll be using this thing for.

[barry99705]

I'm a fan of using pci-x network cards for routers. It's what we do with our clients. They usually get cooked when a lightning strike happens close by through the dsl/cable modem. Swapping out the card fixes it 90% of the time. The other 10% cooks the mobo as well... Haven't tried using usb network cards yet.

[cooper]

We're talking home router on an ITX board. I don't think you can even fit a PCI-X card on there, at least not make use of the additional block of connectors. In a home router setting I also doubt you need the additional performance enabled by using such a card in its intended slot (as opposed to using a regular PCI slot and going for backwards compatibility mode).

Or did you mean PCIe?

[barry99705]

We're talking home router on an ITX board. I don't think you can even fit a PCI-X card on there, at least not make use of the additional block of connectors. In a home router setting I also doubt you need the additional performance enabled by using such a card in its intended slot (as opposed to using a regular PCI slot and going for backwards compatibility mode).

Or did you mean PCIe?

Yea. Pci or pcie. Long day yesterday. 6 hours of driving with 5 hours of pulling network cables in a 90F attic in the middle.

[Rkiver]

I got a Jetway http://www.jetwaycomputer.com/Barebones.html

Built it from there. Runs smoothwall, zero issues.

[cooper]

I used to have a number of Jetway boards back when VIA were actually impressing people with their ITX format and their (comparatively at the time) low-low power use on an x86 platform. Very decent devices and they all supported the same set of expansion boards. One of them was a 3 gigabit network adapter card. The great thing here was that it would lie flush with the mobo so the thing wouldn't increase the overall height.

Sadly, those boards have long since succumb to the dreaded leaky capacitors plague.