Chapter 1: Introduction and hardware

So you have decided to go ahead and read, thank you and hopefully we learn something useful during this adventure.

For the materials needed to do this project, we are going to need a few things, depending on what we want. In my case I'm going to stick to the basics, not going to add optical stuff nor some obscure wireless communication method that is in development either.

• A computer to run as a router, preferably it being an efficient machine that doesn't use much electricity and is silent.
• (At least) Two Ethernet cards, in my case I'm going to opt for the motherboard Ethernet and a separate TP-Link Ethernet card.
• Wireless radios! (Depending on what you want to do) I'm going to go with an Intel AX200 for fast wireless speeds, and a USB TP-Link card for legacy stuff that require a 2.4GHz band.
• A Linux install to set up, in my case I'm going to use the already working Debian install that is set up in my server.

For the software we are going to use, it depends on what we want to do. If we want the machine to behave like an access point/switch and we have a DHCP already going in the network, we will only need to set up a bridge, so bridge-utils and hostapd for the WiFi.

Nonetheless, if we want to have working DHCP in our router, we will have to find a DHCP server. In my case I'm already using Pi-Hole, not complicated and it has a Web UI (plus it blocks ads on the network!). You can also set up your own dnsmasq instance if you want, but I'm not going to focus on that here.