Adventures in Family Computing: Replacing the Router

[mdlbear]

As I mentioned downwhen Stargate, our gateway/router, had become basically unusable by Sunday morning. It's rather mysterious -- the CPU seems to be working fine, and it passed rootkit, memory and filesystem checks just fine. But there you have it: it would slow down rapidly after each reboot.

The next problem was finding a replacement. I tried the machine that had been our router. It wouldn't boot. Even after I noticed that the power connector on the disk had been disconnected, and fixed that. I tried several different ways of replacing it with the fileserver, and succeeded only in disabling its networking altogether with an ill-advised firewall install.

At that point I had two choices: add an extra ethernet card to one of the laptops, or reconfigure our wireless access point as a router instead of a bridge. Fortunately I did the latter. Which was something I'd been toying with for quite a while anyway. Did I mention that I'm somewhat obsessed with saving power?

At this point I have to mention that it wasn't quite that simple. I had to do quite a lot of reconfiguring, and got some of it wrong. For example, forgetting to test incoming ssh. I never did get that to work; it's something of a security hole, so it's not surprising that the router's ssh daemon doesn't listen to the WAN port. When I got back I did what I should have done in the first place, and forwarded the fileserver's ssh port to an alternate on the router.

Also forwarded the fileserver's web server; I still need to set up the appropriate virtual hosting. The other thing that needed attention was that the router was hosting my external git repositories. I moved them to my external host, at savitzky.net. No problem.

DHCP and DNS were a bit of a problem -- the DD-WRT distribution on the router doesn't seem to support multi-homed interfaces or my usual config files. I'll deal. I'll probably have to abandon my hare-brained idea of keeping WiFi and wired interfaces on separate subnets, but that wasn't working too well anyway. And I lose an instance of apcupsd, unless I can get that going on the router.

But the net gain is huge -- I've eliminated a box and about 12W of power-sucking from my rack, improved my security, and gotten a major project out of my "to.do" file. I win.

Comments

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Just a thought, did you check the cache on the defunct router? Memory checks usually only run on the main RAM, not the cpu cache. Of course, if that's failed then you're pretty much screwed...but at least you'd know why. Although it could be a firmware fault, instead of hardware failure, it which case it might be fixable.

[mdlbear]

Not sure there's a good way to test the CPU cache, and in any case it would, as you say, be unfixable.

Software (the router is a miniITX board running Debian) is also possible, though I'm running the same distro on multiple other systems with no problems.

That kind of leaves the second ethernet card (unlikely), the disk (actually a USB flash drive), and the fact that there's no swap space (because you don't want to put swap on a flash drive).

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Hmm.. messed up .config file somewhere perhaps? I mean, if some temp files weren't getting deleted when they should that could do it. [which would explain why it was ok when you reboot, because that'd clear them.] Although, at this point, if it were me, I'd be testing the unlikely possibilities too.

[mdlbear]

*nods* Yeah; tmpfs is a possibility I don't think I'd considered.

Fortunately, the new setup is working well; I can take my time about figuring out a use for the old box.