Although we have many types of communication devices with many different names, at their core they can often be reduced to a computer with some specific peripherals. This is especially true for something like a router, a device found in almost any home these days. Some consumer-grade routers may contain something special like a VDSL modem, but most have a WAN Ethernet jack on one side and one or more LAN-facing Ethernet ports.
All other functionality is implemented in software, including any firewall, router and DHCP features. What this means is that any old PC with at least two Ethernet ports or equivalent can be a router as long as you install the right software.
In this article we will look at what consumer level options are available today, something so simple that the average home user can set it up with little training.
Where Routers Are Terrible
While these days most people are happy to use any consumer router thrown their way by their ISP or bought from any electronics retailer, the era of home routers that began in the 90s was tough. Not only did most ISPs for a long time have strict rules against even thinking about installing any kind of connection sharing router on the precious internet connection they kindly provided access to, the routers available even in the 2000s weren’t particularly good either.
Perhaps the worst issue you can run into as an internet savvy user is that these units come with a very small amount of RAM and a routing table that will fill up in seconds if you think about doing anything as bad as downloading Linux ISOs via Bittorrent. Even more than simple internet usage is prone to problems like router freezing and needing to reboot.
Being the naive type that lived in various tech forums at the time, I opted to throw some ISA NICs in an old 486DX2-66 PC, put FreeSCO on a 1.44 MB floppy and used that instead. Even the 16 MB or so of EDO or FP RAM on that old system easily held up to any Internet traffic related abuse I threw at it and the rest of the family.
Later I was running Smoothwall on a discarded Pentium 166 system that I salvaged from e-waste as a healthy upgrade. But over time as consumer routers stopped being bad, I ended up using those instead. That said, despite recent advances there are still reasons today to bundle your router.
These reasons can vary from the easy growth of control, and peace of mind in an era when the router firmware of commercial buyers does not seem to get the quality assurance that they should get. There is also the thought of the government’s repressive policies, as well as ulterior motives such as simply participating in communication gear.
Today’s Choices
Even though we’ve moved on a few years since the 2000s, it would be nice if we could still dig out an old 486 PC in the closet and use it, just to bring back as little needs as possible. If we look at the list of router and firewall distributions on Wikipedia we can get an idea of what is available today. Naturally we would prefer something that is open source, updated and well supported as we will be exposing it to the worst that the modern internet has to offer.
Sadly, FreeSCO isn’t even a list, and based on the project’s website it doesn’t look like it hasn’t been updated since 2014. Similarly, the free version of Smoothwall (Express) no longer appears to be truly supported, as commercial offerings are promoted instead. A promising project is something like OPNsense, which is a FreeBSD-based distribution that does basically everything network-related and then some. It’s also resource intensive, demanding 4+ GB of RAM and more, with features that the average home user probably won’t use.
The second project is the well-known OpenWrt, which not only provides some firmware images for commercial routers, but also for standard x86 and ARM hardware. This should tick all the boxes mentioned above, including the ability to use x86-compatible chips, while obviously also providing driver support for almost any NIC and possibly even WNICs.
Ironically, my current internet router is a Xiaomi device running OpenWrt with a custom web UI, so I’m familiar with it that way. I also have no complaints about its stability, so this should be smooth sailing as a first attempt.
A quick side note here: although I said that consumer-grade routers are no longer bad today, this Xiaomi router replaced the terrible TP-Link Archer C80 with its small 4 MB Flash, OpenWrt compatibility and IPv6 violations. Caveat emptor, as they say, consumer-grade routers can still be pretty bad.
It’s not Collecting, I swear
Like any self-respecting tech enthusiast I have a few drawers and boxes with relevant hardware, including a bunch of industrial Intel Atom mini-ITX boards and some PCI Gbit NICs. While I could throw this in a bad old case with a questionable-but-maybe-good PSU, I decided to get a new budget case and PSU, just so I could feel more confident about power swapping:
The mainboard is a 2009-era Intel Desktop Board D410PT, with two 1 GB DDR2 RAM sticks. There is only a 10/100 Mbit Ethernet adapter on board in addition to a PCI 1 Gbit adapter, but this is good enough to test the basics. Older Ethernet chips should definitely be supported.
With the entire kit built together, the OpenWrt Wiki entry for x86 installation was followed, with a non-EFI Ext4-based image written to a 512 MB microSD card. This card was installed via a USB adapter, although the Wiki page makes it clear that there are many ways to install OpenWrt, including an internal (SATA/IDE/etc.) storage device.
Here the process of choosing an OpenWrt image is more complicated than that of FreeSCO, since you have to know whether the system uses UEFI or traditional BIOS, and decide between the option of SquashFS and Ext4 for the root partition. Even after looking at the pros and cons of both I’m still torn as to which is better.
There is also the issue of supported network cards, with standard graphics that support Intel and Realtek Ethernet chipsets. Having compatible NICs installed is more important than back in the days of the standard NE2000.
Sad Trombone
After firing up the newly built rig and briefly powering it up to replace the heavily drained CMOS battery, I was hoping to see something promising on the connected screen. However apart from PXE boot attempts on both Ethernet cards before the ‘no bootable devices found’ error message nothing happened.
I’ve gone through the BIOS to make sure all the ‘boot from USB’ options are enabled and I’ve tried multiple SD-to-USB card adapters in multiple USB ports, but it seems either the OpenWrt image provided doesn’t open or the Curse of Active USB Devices has struck again.
Although I haven’t stopped yet with DIY-ing an x86 router on old hardware in 2026 and I still have to give the LEAF a shot, I have to say that compared to the FreeSCO method of just slapping that floppy on the FDD, running through the configuration and doing, things are much more complicated today. I would never trust the average person to use these steps to set up their own consumer grade router.
Maybe for the LEAF version I’ll dig out a rig with an FDD header on the mainboard and run it off a 1.44 MB floppy like in the good old days. Until then feel free to comment about what obvious mistakes I made with OpenWrt, how I should use OPNsense on an old Xeon 19″ rig, or perhaps your experiences with FreeSCO, SmoothWall, OpenWrt, and/or LEAF on lovingly restored e-waste.
Featured Image: “Ethernet Router” by [gratuit].
