Sitting in isolation thinking, it would be really cool to have an ubuntu based router / gateway. I never trust the software on “normal” routers even ones that cost hundreds of pounds. And the Ubuntu Core / Snap ecosystem sounds perfect! However i’m not sure if it’s just me but there seems a lack of router based software that’s snapped and ready to go.
Pluses would be
Ubuntu is actually supported and receives security updates.
Confinement from core and snaps should hopefully reduce the router getting pwned.
All the great update features of snaps (rollback, updates etc)
Ability to add new capabilities with more snaps
Some requirements for this would be
NAT routing
DHCP server
DNS server
Some kind of configurable firewall
VLAN segmentation ability
QoS for traffic prioritisation
I’m sure there’s features i’ve missed, and this is probably quite a vague idea, but it’s something I think would be really cool, and allow me to create my own reliable router / gateway.
I would totally love an appliance to do this. It would likely replace my aging openwrt netgear box.
The problem I have is what hardware to get. Something which has multiple GbE physical ethernet ports would be a must (for my use case) - at the minimum two. So I could attach one to my cable modem and one to the rest of the network. I appreciate others might need more interfaces, but I think two is the minimum viable product.
I guess one could use a raspberry pi with a supported USB ethernet adapter, as a real base MVP. Did you have a hardware target in mind?
for firewalling on Ubuntu Core we do have UFW in the store, that should help with NAT and general firewalling …
there is a network-manager snap with which you could achieve a few of the other tasks (DNS/DHCP) …
I was thinking the same hardware wise, the only thing I can find that has two ethernet ports built in is something ITX size, but that could be a bit too large / power hungry
I suspect a lot has changed in those 3 years. If it’s possible to get OpenWRT (or LeDe or whatever is the current best choice - I don’t know) prototyped, tested and published, that would be a good starting point, maybe?
Typically the rockchip devices are having basic support upstream (or in the ubuntu kernel tree) with just needing proper config options set … if this is the case bringing up an initial basic image for such a board is a matter of an afternoon for an experienced person and perhaps in max a week of afternoons for someone less experienced
here are some rockchip gadgets that could serve as templates:
