The old router at work has been feeling its age lately. It’s been solid for a long time, honestly, but I’ve decided it’s washed. So I grabbed an “old and busted” PC to build a new soft router. Specs below: After almost two weeks of messing with it, it finally feels stable. I’ve got “load balancing,” “circumventing the GFW,” “ad filtering” and the like running on this thing, but I hit a ton of pitfalls. Here’s the summary.

Moving to a new place means setting up a new router. This time, though, I decided to do something a little different. Soft routers have been popular for a while, so I figured I’d give one a try.