Raspberry Pi as a Router

[kirby urner]

Greetings Charles.  

That going-viral FBI warning to upgrade firmware on consumer grade routers [1] such as we find at Fry's and Circuit City (Best Buy, Walmart...) reminded me that most parental units (nuclear family households) have no experience with: 

(A) R-Pi nor 

(B) R-Pi in the role of household router.  

let alone really managing their public-facing appliances.  All across the nation, confused parents are looking for router passwords and trying to remember the recipes for hacking in.

That's something to think about when you get to marketing, and brings up questions about GUI interface.

As a parent, when I hack in to 198.192.0.1, what will I see? Do we have a screen shot, or is it all controlled by a phone app these days?  My Netgear router gave me this:

https://flic.kr/p/26sKrdd

The reason I bring up phone app is because of this:

https://flic.kr/p/24NVKFY (Enable Circle with Disney)

https://flic.kr/p/27umN9A (after clicking Learn More -- much longer page than shown here).

The story: 

Upon upgrading my Netgear R7000's firmware (complying with FBI requests [1]), I was offered an opportunity to install something Disney thinks I might want, to protect my children from nasty trolls and boogey monsters.  Keep the Muggles out and so on.  

Bundling the Netdispenser idea with router controls in general is maybe more than an R-Pi need take on, if it's behind another router and only plays the role of a Netdispenser and nothing more.  

That way you're not competing with CISCO or Netgear in the router market, as you're just adding another WiFi node, with its own SSID behind the public facing router.  Is that how you see it, or do you envision the Netdispenser duplicating all the capabilities of a consumer router?

Kirby

[1]  https://www.cnet.com/news/the-fbi-wants-you-to-reboot-your-router-now-to-help-destroy-a-botnet/

The same FBI warning is also featured in my blog post of today, which is mainly devoted to chronicling a battle royale to get geopandas to work.  I made progress.

http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2018/05/geopandas.html

When I finally get the old R-Pi back up and running, I might try miniconda (you might think I'd have done that by now, but I've mainly used my R-Pi to "blow bubbles"):

https://flic.kr/p/KEwhSu

[C. Cossé]

Hi Kirby,

On Sunday, May 27, 2018 at 12:57:48 AM UTC-7, kirby urner wrote:

Greetings Charles.  

Bundling the Netdispenser idea with router controls in general is maybe more than an R-Pi need take on, if it's behind another router and only plays the role of a Netdispenser and nothing more.  

That way you're not competing with CISCO or Netgear in the router market, as you're just adding another WiFi node, with its own SSID behind the public facing router.  Is that how you see it, or do you envision the Netdispenser duplicating all the capabilities of a consumer router?

That's how I see it, indeed, and how it's implemented.  I'm looking at re-developing, possibly as an npm package.  If you can think of a hardware-less solution pls let me know!

-C