Building a DIY SOHO router, Part 1

Building a DIY SOHO router using the Yocto Project build system OpenEmbedded, Part 1

I spend my days working on embedding Linux in devices where the end user doesn’t typically think about what’s running inside. As a result, I became motivated to embed Linux in a device that’s a little more visible, even if only to myself. To that end, in this series of articles I will discuss how to build your own SOHO router using the Yocto Project build system, OpenEmbedded.

I realize that many people may be asking the question, “Why build our own router when there are any number of SOHO routers available on the market that are specifically built using good Open Source technologies?”. Commonly, when this question is answered in other guides the major reasons for Roll Your Own (RYO) tend to be better performance and enhanced security. While these are both true, that’s not the primary motivation behind this series. While projects like pfSense and OpenWrt are wonderful for a “turn-key solution”, they don’t meet one of my primary requirements. My requirement is to use my favorite Linux distribution creation tools, and gain a stronger understanding of the inner working of these tools when building a system from the ground up. This is why I’ve chosen to build my router with OpenEmbedded.

What are the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded? To quote from the former’s website:

The Yocto Project (YP) is an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems regardless of the hardware architecture.

The OpenEmbedded Project (OE) is the maintainer of the core metadata used to create highly flexible and customized Linux distributions and a member of the Yocto Project. As a long time developer and user of YP and OE, these projects have become my favorite tools for creating customized distributions. It’s also something that we frequently use and support commercially at Konsulko Group.

Let’s consider what software is required to meet the functional requirements of the SOHO router. My high-level requirements are:

  • Wired/Wireless networking – basic network connectivity
  • Firewall – necessary when a device is on the Internet
  • Wireless access point – required to support the end user’s many WiFi devices
  • Over-The-Air (OTA) software update – My initial software load will be improved and bug fixed in the same manner as any commercial product and requires a simple update path

OpenEmbedded provides all of these features as well as other advanced features I’d like to leverage such as container virtualization.

With the question of software features settled, the next issue is hardware selection. One of the major advantages of OpenEmbedded is that it runs on a wide range of processors and boards, so there are many options. Depending on one’s specific use case, one option is to use any x86-64 based system with two or more ethernet ports. For example, the SolidPC Q4 or the apu2 platform. Another direction would be to use an ARM CPU and look at the HummingBoard Pulse, NXP i.MX6UL EVK, or even the venerable Raspberry Pi 3 B, and making use of a USB ethernet adapter for secondary ethernet. If you have a specific piece of hardware in mind, so long as there’s Linux support for it, you can use it. I did pick something from the above list for my specific installation. However, this guide is intended to be hardware agnostic and so I will highlight any hardware-dependent portions along the way.

Now it’s necessary to further develop detailed requirements and expectations that we have for the router. First, the device is expected to be able to perform all of the standard duties of a modern SOHO router. It’s not just a WiFi access point and IPv4 NAT. It also must handle complicated firewall rules, and support public IPv6 configuration of the LAN (when the ISP supports IPv6). This is an advanced router, so it’s not enough to simply pass along the ISP-defined DNS servers. I may like to push my outbound traffic, with a few exceptions for streaming services, perhaps, through a VPN. OpenEmbedded, via various metadata collections stored in layers, supports all of these features with its core layer and a few of the main additional layers.

I’m selecting Mender for self-managed A/B style OTA upgrades. Why? I don’t have redundant routers, and I’d like to be able to both experiment with enabling new features and updates (such as a new Linux kernel version or other core component), firewall changes, and minimize downtime if anything goes wrong. Neither myself nor my users (my family) are tolerant of much in the way of Internet outages, so the ability to fall back to a known good state with just a reboot is a major feature. I want the router to be kept as current as possible, and with A/B style updates there’s much less state to maintain from release to release. As a result, the router installation will be made as stateless as possible. If a component parameter is configured by the router administration, it comes in the installation image. This will not only help with rollback, but also make it much easier to back up the router. Having the exact config file for something like dnsmasq is a lot more portable than an nvram export that’s tied to a specific hardware model, just in case of lightning strikes.

As a framework component for enabling some advanced router features, LXC will be included via the meta-virtualization layer to support containers. I realize that many people will be asking, “Why would anybody want containers on a router?”. The answer is, quite simply, that there are many good examples of router-appropriate software that’s well managed by containers rather than directly on the installation itself. In this guide, I use the example of pi-hole as an advanced router feature that I want to enable. A container allows us keep it current in the manner which the project itself recommends. The container also supports the goal of keeping a minimum amount of state on the device that must be backed up elsewhere. Could Docker have been used here instead? Potentially, yes. Due to some peculiarities of the IPv6 deployment by my ISP, LXC is much easier to deploy than Docker.

Finally, lets talk about security. For this first guide, what that means is that YP does its best to keep software up to date with respect to known security issues as well as making it easy to enable compiler-generated safeguards such as -fstack-protector-strong and string format protections. On top of that there are layers available which support various forms of owner-controlled measured boot and various Linux Security Models such as Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA). As the former is hardware dependent we’re going to leave that to a follow-on series as the specific hardware I’m using lacks certain hardware components to make that useful. As for IMA, it can be difficult to combine that with containers so it too will be covered in another series.

[Go to Part Two of the series.]