One of my hobby projects is to build a “fully fledged” wireless  FreeBSD router. To do this I got a Soekris 6501-50 which has four gigabit ports and two mini PCIe slots.

For storage I have a small 30GB miniPCIe SSD (OCZ-NOCTI). I have two wireless cards installed one dual band 3x3MIMO minipcie card from COMPEX (When FreeBSD gets up to speed with 802.11ac I will upgrade to a WLE900VX) and for legacy 2.4Ghz I use a TPLINK TL-WN781ND. These two cards are then used for two virtual interfaces each, one for my primary wlan and one for my guest wlan.

Atennas

One important part of the wireless part of the router is the antennas. For a long time I used three consumer antennas (ALLNET ALL19003) for 5GHz use for my COMPEX card, but when I moved to a new apartment and switched to 5GHz I didnt get good speeds everywhere in the apartment. This got me thinking about a ceiling antenna. But I found it very hard to find one in consmer stores, so I turned to Ebay. I found a decently cheap Laird S2451DBT 6port antenna which is now mounted in the ceiling at a central point of the apartment.

Firewall

To do packet filtering I use the OpenBSD derived pf(4) which has been in FreeBSD for a long time now.

Wireless networks

Like I told you in earlier I have two physical cards and two networks (ssid). One primary and one guest networks with tighter rules but less strict authentication.

The firt step here is to find a card supported by FreeBSD, but also have support for hostap mode, obviously mine does. To get it to run WPA2 Personal on a specific channel the configuration is very easy

interface=wlan2
ctrl_interface=/var/run/hostapd
ctrl_interface_group=wheel
ssid=web2
wpa=2
wpa_passphrase=
wpa_key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
wpa_pairwise=CCMP

Lately I started to use the more secure WPA2 Enterprise and you can read about my configuration here

Other networks

My internet provider is Telia and I have something they call Triple Play.. (Internet, TV and Tele in the same cable). In order to get this to work you should use their Thompson router that has som magic for splitting up your one incoming fiber into three different networks. After some reading on the interwebs I found out this is really just tagged vlans and I can split them myself without any problem. “Internet” comes untagged and the IPTV traffic comes in on tag 845, so I just create a vlan interface with my external interface as parent and then bridge this interface to one of my internal interfaces on the Soekris. (and of coruse connect the IPTV-box to this port). You can read more about this configuration here (swedish)

This is how the interfaces are configured