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Comment by 24gttghh | Hacker News Reader

Cool work being done here. I particularly like that it uses mini-PCIe cards as the 5Ghz antennas! [0]

[0]https://librerouter.org/document/schematic-v1/

I think that's more or less a Qualcomm reference design, and an old one at that. It's a little surprising that they went with a 2013 MIPS based SoC instead of ARM. The PCIe wireless cards are also a bit disappointing - QCA9582, which only does 802.11n. In theory, if the PCIe cards are really socketed, you could swap in a faster wireless card, but I suspect that the SoC wouldn't keep up.

I am a big believer these days in letting radios be radios - if you want a high capacity, relatively low cost 5.x GHz band PTP link, something like two ubnt AF5XHD radios and a pair of RF Elements Ultrahorn antennas. Put the routing intelligence and anything that requires a good amount of CPU and RAM in something dedicated to that purpose at each site, such as a Mikrotik RB3011 or RB4011 ($199).

https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_rm

Or a home-made hacked together x86-64 system running VyOS or FRR, if you want, which can be assembled for zero dollars in many cases. Or zero dollars plus the cost of a few Intel 1000BaseT NICs.

They're probably using 802.11n WiFi because all 802.11ac NICs require proprietary firmware, but Qualcomm-Atheros 802.11n hardware doesn't, and can be used just with fully open-source drivers.

I was fine with MIPS (which Ubiquity uses as well) until I found out that Linux/MIPS doesn't support ASLR/DEP. [1]

[1] https://cyber-itl.org/assets/papers/2018/Linux_MIPS_missing_...

It looks like the librerouter.org ssl certificate expired 15 minutes ago.

Correct. [1] Hopefully someone will email them.

[1] - https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=librerouter.o...

They goofed their letsencrypt renew cron job.

I sent them a message via their Contact page form.

Eh? "as the antennas"? That's not what that schematic shows, is it? AFAICT there's a PCIe connection to the NIC (Atheros QCA9582), which, as an 802.11 NIC, naturally has antennas.

Very broadly, in the same category as these, which is a single board computer with multiple minipci slots into which you can install 802.11n or 802.11ac based radio interface cards. Typically with 50 ohm coaxial u.fl connectors to coax pigtails going to external antennas.

https://mikrotik.com/product/RB435G

https://mikrotik.com/product/RB433AH

https://mikrotik.com/product/RB493G

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