Turn a PC into a router
Who needs a router anyway?
To most people, a router is a mysterious box that makes the internet work. In reality, the routers you buy are just low powered PCs with a built-in switch and some fancy antennas. The routing stuff is actually all in the software, and it’s entirely possible to quite easily turn a regular PC into a router. You can use your current PC as a router and wireless access point very easily now, and if you’re feeling hardcore you could even turn an old PC into an extremely powerful dedicated router with enterpriseclass features.
Let’s walk through how you can achieve both of these aims.
Just a wireless hotspot
Let’s just say you want to share your PC’s internet connection with other devices around the home or wherever you are. If you’re using a USB 4G modem you might want to do this, for example. You might also want to share your VPN connection with other devices, so that everything is routing through the VPN you’re connected to on your PC. Then this technique should do the trick.
Thanks to the Anniversary update to Windows 10, it’s now very easy to turn your PC into a wireless hotspot that shares its internet connection to devices that connect to it.
Head to Settings > Network & Internet. You’ll see on the left there’s now a Mobile hotspot option. Click on it.
As you might imagine, this actually works very much like the hotspot feature on your phone.
Before you click to turn it on, you might want to adjust some settings. It supports both WiFi and Bluetooth, but WiFi is recommended for best speed and compatibility. If you have more than one active internet connection on the PC, you can choose which one you’re sharing to people who connect to the hotspot. If you have a VPN that you want to share, make sure you connect to it, then choose it from this list.
Then you can click on Edit to change the network name, password and radio frequency band.
Once you’ve done that, you can flick the switch to turn it on. Your PC will now become a hotspot. Any devices that connect to it will route their internet traffic through that PC and the selected internet connection from that PC – which is to say that the PC has become a router.
Essentially, what’s going on behind the scenes here is that you’re activating Windows’ wireless access point functionality – which has been there for many years but was mostly hidden. It turns your PC’s wireless adapter into an access point. It’s then enabling internet connection sharing (ICS) for the selected connection. It’s something that could be done before with some effort, and is also available in third party tools like Virtual Router Manager and mHotspot, but is now made very accessible directly in Windows.
A full-blown homemade router
The above option is useful if you’d like to continue to use your PC as a PC. You can use it normally even as you’re sharing the internet connection. But it’s also possible to completely turn a PC into a full blown dedicated router. You can use an old PC,
and even with an old PC the result will likely be a router far, far more powerful than most commercial solutions, since most commercial routers have limited software and tend to run on weak mobile processors.
All you need to do is install a router operating system on the PC. Along with the OS, the PC will need a WiFi adapter and a single Ethernet port for the WAN connection, both of which are built into nearly every PC. (We should note that if you want to share across a wired network you will need a second Ethernet port to serve as the LAN port, which can then be connected to an Ethernet switch to increase the number of ports; a USB Ethernet card will suffice).
There are a number of dedicated router operating systems available: Zeroshell ( zeroshell.org), MikroTik RouterOS ( mikrotik.com) and Untangle Lite ( www.untangle.com) all offer more features than most stock routers.
DD-WRT ( dd-wrt.com), an immensely popular router firmware replacer is also available for X86 systems, which is to say PCs. DD-WRT on PC works nearly exactly like it does on any router platform – the interface is the same, the features are the same. Those features include enterprise-class network management, VPN, file services and much more.
Installing these operating systems can be tricky, since they often don’t have a classic installer like Windows. Often you’ll have to take the hard drive out of the PC destined to be the router and plug it into a functioning Windows PC. Then you go through the process of copying an image to it, and plugging it back into the router PC. Obviously this is easier if you use a USB drive to boot from. The full process for DD-WRT, for example, can be seen here wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/X86.
It’s a little bit of effort, but the end result will be router software more capable and likely faster than anything you’ll find in the consumer space. And, of course, there are always the “I build my own routers” bragging rights...
Can I directly connect to the NBN box with my PC?
The answer, to put it simply, is yes.
On pre-NBN connections, you typically needed a modem – DSL or cable – to connect to the internet, and that would make it impossible without an adapter card to connect to the net directly with a PC: the PC’s Ethernet port wouldn’t talk to the ADSL line, for example. So you needed a modem router to bridge that gap.
With the NBN, however, every home is provided with a modem – that’s what the internal NBN Connection Box is. Normally you would plug a router into the first UNI-D port. But if you’ve turned your PC into a router (using Windows, DD-WRT or other methods), then you can plug it in directly. Just connect an Ethernet port on the PC to the UNI-D1 port on the back of the NBN connection box, which is the port where you would normally plug a router.
You still need to configure it to connect to your ISP, just as you would a normal router, and how you do that will vary by ISP. On some ISPs, like Telstra, that use IP over Ethernet (IPoE), you actually don’t need to do anything – it should just work when you plug it in, so long as you have DHCP configured on the Ethernet port on the PC (which is the default in Windows and DD-WRT).
Other ISPs might use PPPoE with a username and password. So in DD-WRT, for example, you would need to set the connection type to PPPoE and enter the username and password given to you by your ISP.
On Windows, you also need to set up PPPoE if your ISP requires it. You do this by using the internet connection wizard in the Network and Sharing Centre. Go to Settings > Network & Internet. On the Status page, click on Network and Sharing Centre. Then click on the link to ‘Set up a new connection or network.’
Now follow the wizard to create a new internet connection using PPPoE. Just choose to create a new internet connection, select PPPoE as the type, and enter the username and password. Check the box to allow other people to use the connection. Once you’ve done that, you’ve turned you PC into a router that can talk to the internet directly through the NBN Connection Box, no other hardware required.