As I mentioned in my earlier post, I’m running OpenWRT firmware on my Linksys router. This enables the router to do more than just act as a firewall/router, so that it can do things that you’d normally need some pretty expensive kit to run. (e.g. A Linux box dedicated to the task or some pricey Cisco hardware.)

It works great, I’m happy to say. Package management is smooth and easy, and the basics of routing and firewalling are all taken care of. But there’s a few snags…

Firstly, the firewall. It all works off of iptables for netfilter, which is to say that I need to write some fairly hairy firewall rules. Added to this, I want to use video chat, which requires about sixteen thousand ports to be open in order to work. (Okay, 22 ports, but come ON!)