Man, I remember doing this in the late 90s with ipchains as the only way to get a router that didn't cost an arm and a leg. Eventually consumer/prosumer routers came out.
replyWhat's old is new again.
Tenda has good support among OpenWRT.
replySo the next step is a hardware or boot firmware backdoor?
reply(Good to know it remains useful by using openWRT and doesn't become landfill)
Looking to do this to get off stock isp leased router. What's your hardware/distro rec?
replyYou can use basically any hardware. I've done it with trash-picked laptops and USB ethernet adapters. Best option these days is a N100/N150 mini-pc with multiple NICs onboard, but with the price of everything going up maybe trashpicking will make a return.
replyUse openWrt (https://openwrt.org), and use their hardware list to pick a consumer router with the feature set you need that can be flashed to use openWrt.
replyRyzen 5 with a dual 10Gbps NIC, running Debian. Overkill for a router/firewall, but I run other services on the same hardware including an email stack, Podman containers, and small AI model for use within Home Assistant.
replyI wouldn't buy new hardware. Any modest machine built in the last decade would do. If possible, get a machine with an internal ATX power supply rather than an external brick, they tend to be more reliable.
If all you need is 1Gpbs and WiFi, OpenWrt on consumer hardware is probably enough though.
I have a Lenovo thin client running Debian as internet gateway/firewall. With some minor modifications and a small low power blower fan you can add a dual sfp pcie card in it (not all versions can, though there are more manufacturers of thin clients with 4x pcie slots). The blower fan is because the main fan stops often and it needs some cooling.
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