When I got my first broadband Internet connection, I had a roommate that wanted
to share it with me. Since he paid half of the bill, I figured that was fair. I
investigated setting up this newfangled thing called Internet Connection Sharing
in my copy of Windows 98, a friend helped set up something similar in Red Hat
Linux (I was dual-booting at the time). It worked reasonably well for a while,
but after lots of rebuilds and reinstalls and general futzing around with my
computer, I decided that I needed something that didn't require me to have my
computer working properly all the time (I broke stuff a lot, a habit that I have
a hard time breaking), but I didn't really do anything until I moved out and
moved in with a different roommate.

At that time I was doing a little bit of freelance technical support for
friends, family, and coworkers. They kept me in pizza and soft drinks, and,
sometimes, they'd let me take their old computer gear home with me, which would
have saved them a trip to the dump.

On one such occasion, I got an old (even at that time) Packard Bell 486 computer
with a DX4/50 CPU in it. At the time I had been reading about FreeSCO, and
figured that this computer would be a good candidate for me learning about how
to set it up and administer it, so I grabbed a couple of 10BASE-T cards, a
floppy disk, and got to work.

I won't bore you with all of the gory details, but I did manage to get it to
work, and performance was reasonably good. Yes, we had to reboot sometimes
because of power failures and things not coming back up correctly, and, yes, I
had to rebuild the configuration more than once because the floppy mysteriously
corrputed itself, but that was fine. I had a real, proper, fake Cisco router,
and my nerd cred was established.

But, after a while, I started to get a little annoyed at the reboots. I started
to get annoyed at the rebuilding. Mostly, I got annoyed at the amount of power I
was using, and decided that I should retire the old FreeSCO box and get a
pre-fab box that was both easier to configure, faster to boot, and, more
importantly to my wallet, cheaper to keep running all the time.

So, that's what I did. I went through several manufacturers, and they all were
garbage in some way. Most of them would overheat and die within a few months
(usually just outside of their warranty period), but I eventually found one that
seemed like it would be around for the long haul, and I never looked back...
until a couple of weeks ago.

This might get a little technical going forward, so, please note: you have been
warned.

A few weeks back, I started having connectivity problems with the Internet. This
isn't anything new, I've been having problems with my ISP for a while, and I was
just being lazy on calling them out here because it mostly worked most of the
time (and they like to charge me money for coming to take a look at the service
that they're selling me). But, it got bad enough that it was unusable, so I had
to call them. When I made the call, I found that they had silently increased
bandwidth on my plan to 400Mbps. This would have been good news, but the modem I
bought a few years ago topped out at 343Mbps, and I rarely ever saw anything
higher than 250Mbps anyway. So, I figured that the modem was the culprit (hand
in hand with the rotten signal, no doube). So, I got a new modem, called the
technician out here, they determined that there *was* a problem, got it fixed
and that was that.

Only, my speeds didn't increase like they should have. 

This was a little bit perplexing to me. Maybe it hasn't been rolled out in my
neighborhood or city yet? I figured that was probably the case, and continued on
for a while, but then decided to bypass my router completely and plyg my
computer directly into the modem and see what happened.

I got well over the 400Mbps that was advertised. 

So, that's it! My $25 refurbished Linksys router just doesn't have the
horsepower to move that many packets into my network and decide where they
should go. I should replace it. It also doesn't help that the router doesn't
pass my custom DNS settings to devices on my WiFi, which is a minor
inconvenience, but still something that I can fix with one fell swoop. (I also
never really liked this router anyway since they decided that I should have some
kind of cloud app to manage my router. I.E. I can't actually configure my router
without having an Internet connection and a smartphone. I was able to downgrade
the firmware to avoid that, but that also means that it's running super-outdated
firmware anyway). I looked and looked and looked and eventually settled on some
TP-Link router that looked like it would fit the bill, wouldn't break the bank,
and would do what I wanted. So I ordered it.

It arrived, and I set it all up. Setup was kind of a mess. The web gui required
heavy used of Javascript and didn't really work all that well. But the
throughput was good (I was getting all of my megs of bits), so I could deal with
it. 

After a few days, though, I decided to set up a SSH tunnel so that I can access
a server when I'm outside of my network. Set it up, tested it, and...

Nothing.

I tried over and over, and still nothing. I set it on the DMZ, and still
nothing.

After doing some digging, I discovered that TP-Link, in their infinite wisdom,
has decided that they, too need a smartphone app for me to manage my device when
I'm out in the field, and they use SSH to do that. That means that you don't get
to use SSH to connect back through the router from the other side and back in
because they have it 'reserved'. 

I returned that router because it's broken by design.

The rest of the manufacturers are apparently doing the same thing: Linksys,
Asus, Netgear, TP-Link, et cetera. They're adding these apps, and, at the same
time, are putting weird restrictions on what you can and can't do with them. At
least in their home lines. I haven't really investigated their 'professional'
grade things because those are usually way more expensive than I want to go, and
would be super-overkill for the kind of routing that I need to do. 

So, I've decided to go back to my roots. Well, not quite that far, but I have
decided that I'm going to try my hand again at building my own router. I ordered
some hardware, and am digging around for some tutorials to get me started. I'm
not going to have a list of things that I bought or stuff that I did until I'm
done (and I'm successful, if I fail, I'll probably change the subject). But
that's apparently the only way to go forward.