I'd like to replace my conventional home router

[RJE]

with dd-wrt / openwrt installed onto pc.

Can you suggest detailed / step-by-step instruction guides intended for newbies ?

I'd appreciate any insights you may have on this

RJE

 

[Blinkyz]

Its a bit confusing

What is the question?
Which router?
What step-by-step do you need?

 

[TonyH]

with dd-wrt / openwrt installed onto pc.

Can you suggest detailed / step-by-step instruction guides intended for newbies ?

I'd appreciate any insights you may have on this

RJE

Sorry, what is conventional home router? What router model do you have? You mean you are trying to flash 3rd party firmware? How to instruction is at OpenWrt or dd-wrt site. Some times when mistake is made playing with firmwares, you can end up with dead(bricked) router.

 

[microchip]

with dd-wrt / openwrt installed onto pc.

AFAIK, neither DD-WRT nor OpenWRT work on regular PC. Unless you mean something else with "PC"?

 

[KenZ71]

Substitute pfsense for dd-wrt and install on a low power consumption PC

 

[Nullity]

Are you "upgrading" to get more features or as a learning experience?

If you want features, check out Ubiquiti's EdgeRouter X or EdgeRouter Lite devices, or maybe something from MikroTik.

If you want a learning experience, install pfSense or IPFire on a PC.



Do be careful though. A poorly configured gateway router can open your network to very dangerous things...
A good (free) source of computer networking information can be found at http://intronetworks.cs.luc.edu/current/html/.

 

[sfx2000]

with dd-wrt / openwrt installed onto pc.

Can you suggest detailed / step-by-step instruction guides intended for newbies ?

I can appreciate your situation, but I'm concerned that you're not thinking thru things.

For most folks - a Tier1 Router/AP from a leading vendor is more that enough.

 

[RJE]

Substitute pfsense for dd-wrt and install on a low power consumption PC

Can you define "low power consumption PC" ?
RJE

 

[RJE]

Thank you all for your eye opening comments
I've decided to put my ambitious plan on hold until i'm wiser
RJE

 

[KenZ71]

Can you define "low power consumption PC" ?
RJE

It's wise to look before leaping, I did not. I bought an HP ML10 with the plan to run pfsense, Windows and NAS4Free as VMs. Then after reading some more I wiped out.

Why? Decided it was not worth having one point of failure. Also, if the virtual router were compromised my NAS would be exposed as well.

Ok, counter point to that buy a stand-alone like an Intel NUC for pfsense. After looking at those and the cost I decided to tofu fold over my cash & put it back in my pocket. The netgear router I have with ddwrt works just fine.

In the future if / when I outgrow the netgear maybe I'll revisit pfsense.