I’m no CCNA, but computer networking is fun. I’ve always been the kind of person to configure everything by hand, build computers, hack up scripts to get things done, and so on. Years ago, I flashed my Linksys router with dd-wrt in order to get the most out of it (better performance mainly), but I was never really satisfied with that. The biggest gap was the lack of IPv6: because my router only had 4 MB of RAM, it could not load a dd-wrt version with IPv6 support. Once Comcast started handing out IPv6 addresses to my (purchased, not rented) Motorola Surfboard cable mode, which I discovered entirely by accident, I was even more unhappy. Alas, though, I was stuck with what I had for a while.
The biggest problem was finding something that was consumer-grade that supported features like IPv6. Pro stuff I don’t want to pay for, and consumer stuff was usually lacking in the customization department, especially with regards to things like IPv6. What I really wanted was a tiny form-factor computer, about the size of your typical consumer-grade wireless router, with several gigabit LAN ports running Linux, so I could configure all of it. I looked in vain for something that wasn’t several hundred dollars; I didn’t want a full-blown PC, even in a tiny form factor, as that was overkill. I was disappointed, until I learned earlier this year about Ubiquiti.
They sell exactly what I was looking for in the form of the EdgeRouter Lite: router-sized, DC-powered, Linux-running (called EdgeOS), fully-customizable, with three gigabit ports and a stated max performance of a million packets per second. And at about $90 at Amazon, it’s a fantastic deal. But it’s not for the faint of heart: you have to do some serious configuration with this thing. Out of the box, it is essentially a dumb brick, and you have to make it work the way you want it to. Which is, of course, the way I want it to be!
So in the interests of making it easier for folks out there, I’m going to spend a few posts talking through what I did step-by-step in order to get this up and running, starting from a bare-bones config to what I have now, the dual-stack, zone-firewall, VLAN setup that I was aiming for. On the way, I’ll get into the switch I bought for fun and how having Splunk is really, really helpful for troubleshooting. Stay tuned!
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