The Homebrew Special—looking a bit blurry, because I wanted to take a low-light shot to try to capture the disco glow. 2 more images in gallery After finally reaching the tipping point with off-the-shelf solutions that can’t match increasing speeds available, we recently took the plunge. Building a homebrew router  turned out to be a better proposition than we could’ve ever imagined. With nearly any speed metric we analyzed, our little DIY kit outpaced routers whether they were of the $90- or $250-variety. Naturally, many readers asked the obvious follow-up—”How exactly can we  put that together?” Today it’s time to finally pull back the curtain and offer that walkthrough. By taking a closer look at the actual build itself (hardware and software), the testing processes we used, and why we used them, hopefully any Ars readers of average technical abilities will be able to put together their own DIY speed machine. And the good news? Everything is as open source as it gets—the equipment, the processes, and the setup. If you want the DIY router we used, you can absolutely have it. This will be the guide to lead you, step-by-step. What is a router, anyway? At its most basic, a router is just a device that accepts packets on one interface and forwards them on to another interface that gets those packets closer to their eventual destination. That’s not what most of us are really thinking when we think of “a router” in the sense of something we’ll plug into our home or office to get to the Internet, though. What do we need to have before any homebrew device looks like a router? Read 66 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The Ars guide to building a Linux router from scratch