Linux Router Project

» see linuxrouter.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Dave Cinege wanted a router and did not want to buy one. In 1997 he started the Linux Router Project, which fit a working Linux system onto a single 1.44 MB floppy disk and turned any abandoned 486 with two network cards into a real piece of network equipment. No hard drive was involved. You booted the floppy and the machine routed packets until somebody unplugged it, with the entire system running out of memory.

The project outgrew its own name almost immediately. It started as a router on a floppy and became a general purpose network operating system, written in C and Bourne shell under the GPL, small enough that the constraint was effectively the design document: every decision had to answer to how many kilobytes were left. By the 2.9.8 stable release on 12 September 2000, people were running it as a firewall or as the one box that shared a single connection across a house, on hardware they had already written off.

Its most durable export was not the distribution. BusyBox had been maintained by Enrique Zanardi until early 1998, when Cinege took it over specifically because LRP needed it, since one binary answering to dozens of command names was the only way to get a usable userland into that much space. Parts written or sharpened for LRP are still in BusyBox today, and BusyBox is now inside a very large share of the world's home routers, which means the shape of this project is sitting in most people's hallways.

On 6 May 2003 Cinege rewrote the LRP website to say the project was being abandoned. Work on LRP 5.0 had stopped a few months in for financial reasons, and he then declined to release any of it, or even to say what the operating system was called, citing animosity toward the computer industry and what he saw as large corporations plundering the work of open source authors. Slashdot carried it on 23 June 2003 under a headline that said only that the Linux Router Project was dead.

~ the dossier ~

~ living inside 1.44 megabytes ~

The floppy was not a delivery format here, it was the specification. Everything had to fit, so nothing was in there twice. The configuration for the machine lived on the same disk as the system that read it, and that produced a property nobody designs for on purpose and everybody who ran one remembers: the router had no writable state worth losing. If it broke you rebooted, and if the disk broke you wrote another one.

This is the reason LRP became the base layer for so many other things. A GPL floppy image that boots on any junk PC asks nothing of whoever picks it up.

~ the box under the desk ~

A floppy router presumed a household with a spare machine to throw at the problem. In Turkey around 2000, the spare machine was the hard part. One family PC on one dial-up line was the normal shape of things, and a single computer on a single modem has nothing to route between, so the entire premise needed a second machine before it needed any software. My own version of this got solved commercially and late. TTNet broadband turned up for me around 2006 already wearing a plastic box that did the routing and the wireless, and the small Linux running inside that box was not something the box ever mentioned.

~ the forks that kept going ~

Cinege could take his own work off the table and could not take the idea back. LEAF, the Linux Embedded Appliance Framework, forked off LRP and outlived it by well over a decade. Dozens of other embedded distributions and commercial products used LRP as their starting point, often without saying so, which is what the license permitted and what Cinege eventually grew bitter about.

The domain is still registered and still answers, which is the strangest part of visiting it. linuxrouter.org serves a page titled Default Server Root that says there is nothing here and that you have probably become completely and hopelessly lost, and the file's last-modified date is 17 March 2006. Somebody has been paying for an Apache to serve that one placeholder for twenty years. The message Cinege wrote in 2003 to announce that he was done is not on it.

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