Network router installation

[mtbc]

This afternoon I did go ahead and make major changes to the router through which we are online. Specifically, I installed NetBSD on it. There is much to do yet, ranging from shell profiles to NTP, but we are actually onine so that is enough for today. The nearest I had to my desired firewall setup was a pf.conf that I had written for OpenBSD 6.1; for expediency today I backported that to something that works sufficiently under the NetBSD version but I'll have to translate it to an npf.conf. One issue was my failure to notice that a patch cable to the access point had come loose so when wireless clients could not get IPs it was not because pf was blocking them or dhcpd was ignoring them. I also observed awkward driver issues with a USB ethernet adaptor where the corega FEther USB-TXS ran unreliably and an ASIX AX88179 loses the carrier but I remembered my laptop's adaptor, a Realtek RTL8153, which NetBSD appears to be driving fine; I think my Linux laptop gets on fine with the ASIX instead. It also turned out to be critical to figure out the old-pf syntax for MSS clamping. That was all quite enough for today anyway. I took brief breaks to make myself a couple of tisanes along the way.

Update: Tonight I also got NTP and DNS working, different master zones being served from different interfaces. Another issue earlier today was not only backporting NAT configuration to earlier pf but also remembering to use sysctl to enable IP forwarding.

Comments

[goldibehr]

Yes, I've used them before. They're surprisingly powerful for their size. The only downside is they seem to use the cheapest fan imaginable, and the bearings go bad after only a year or two.

[mtbc]

Ah, good to know. Been a while since I had to change a fan. Nice that they're mostly standard sizes! (A friend was surprisingly good at dismantling and fixing them but they're so cheap I never learned.)