this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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Sounds like netgear routers are now 100% confirmed to be compromised with backdoors instead of just being probable
Time to flash the old Netgear router with some open source firmware.
Yep, but unfortunately it's not always as straight forward as it may sound. Plus, with routers becoming more difficult to acquire, it'll only get harder and harder to pull off. But there's OpenWRT and dd-WRT that work with a pretty decent range of routers as well as ASUS Merlin for many ASUS routers. Then, if you want to get nerdy with it and build your own router from an old computer, there's OPNsense and pfSense. Eventually it'll come down to these two if the ban is longterm and you want any semblance of obfuscation online...
GL.iNet are flashable and come with their fork of OpenWRT out of the box. I run the latest regular OpenWRT on mine.
A iot lightbulb can be a router.
Yes, OPNsense is excellent if you have a spare computer to run it. Then you can repurpose your consumer router as a WiFi access point. I still feel safer flashing the old WiFi router with open firmware before using it even as a WAP.
I tried getting into the nerdy side. I have an old PC with only one NIC, but apparently it needs two in order to bridge to a WiFi AP? That makes sense, but I don’t have an old PC with two NICs. Also, my NIC doesn’t support as much bandwidth as I have supplied anyhow. Sad times.
USB network cards are even cheaper than PCIE if you don't mind lower performance (if you don't have USB3 ports you're limited to theoretical 480Mbit)
If it's a desktop PC you can buy a PCIe card with multiple Ethernet ports pretty cheap, especially if you buy used.
Well ya, you need at least two NICs to properly setup a firewall. Additionally, since NICs are the most crucial piece of hardware for routers and firewalls, it'll only be as good as the hardware it runs on. Older NICs lead to regular crashes and/or slow network speeds. So swapping the original NIC out and adding another is VERY typical when repurposing old PCs as a router. The most common options for NICs I've seen are the Intel I350-T2 and I350-T4. Ironically, they cost about as much as a decent router, but going this route actually puts you in control of your home network!
I'm not sure I'd recommend it, but two (or more) VLANs on a single NIC would work fine too. This setup is usually referred to as "router on a stick"
I'm not sure about other OSes or Linux distros, but it's easy to add multiple VLANs on Debian. You load the
8021qkernel module, then add interfaces suffixed with the VLAN ID (e.g. if your NIC isens3, you'd addens3.10to /etc/network/interfaces for VLAN 10). You'd also need to make sure the switch port is configured to allow VLAN10.but the ones you're suggesting (I350-T2 and -T4) are 12 years old.
Great, now I just need everyone else to do this, I can have the greatest most rebust setup imaginable, what am I gonna use it for? To talk to the other two people with similar setups?