How practical could it be to go about making your own router using a bunch of these
slap em together with any old machine on Openwrt or Pfsense and you got a router with as many ports as you could imagine
It seems a bit rediculous but it could work right?
because im actually thinking about this.
what do you think?
You could. PFsense May not have the drivers for the adapters.
OpenWRT you may have to compile the Kernel to support them
It would be cheaper, and much better to just get a switch.
Unless you mean you want actual router interfaces. Then as long as the drivers are supported then I guess it would work.
Sure it could work but seems a little pointless/expensive. An 8 port dumb gigabit switch can be had for very little money.
Voila, many port router.
Example
Hell, there's an even cheaper one :D Dat high res product image
Or you can spend more for a smart switch or even a managed switch and still cost less than 7 of those adapters.
it would be possible but like the others had said, you could just buy a unmanged switch for cheaper, than just run a cable from your pfsense box
I used a USB gigabit lan adapter on a broken netbook i wanted to use a PFsense router. It added some fairly bad latency that was fairly crippling in online games.
Does it work? Yes. Is it optimal? No.