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Comment by nickthemagicman | Hacker News Reader

Do any of these have the ability to be used as a forward proxy?

ESP32 would likely be the easiest path. WiFi on the boards, and an available ssh client library.

But for a proxy, maybe you would want an actual microprocessor instead of a microcontroller. Pi Zero W or similar.

You can use an ESP8266 as a wifi router for up to 8 clients at 5mbps each I think which is really impressive so it should be able to do that... I used that for the kids in the car so that they can play games together

https://github.com/martin-ger/esp_wifi_repeater

There's a partial port on the ESP32. It seems lacking many features over the ESP8266 one, though the project is a lot younger.

https://github.com/martin-ger/esp32_nat_router

I recall that somebody found that the ESP8266 (no info about the ESP32) can talk directly to Ethernet devices, albeit it lacks a proper PHY with magnetics.

https://github.com/cnlohr/espthernet

It could be handy to avoid using the same WiFi subsystem both to connect to the WAN and to accept connections from all clients, which I believe has a huge performance impact.

Now what if we wanted to overcome the speed and number of users limitations by connecting two or more ESP boards in a magnetic-less way, either crossing tx and rx pairs in case of two chips, or using a switch chip such as the RTL8306 to connect more than two ESPs? I think it would be possible. More as an exercise though, since costs would raise to reach many already made products.

Like, for networking? None of these parts have any network capabilities -- they're microcontrollers, not application processors. Even if you added networking capabilities through external hardware, many of them wouldn't have enough memory for a network stack, let alone to handle any protocol on top of that. (Many of them have 4 KB of SRAM, or even less.)

You probably want something with more resources for that use.

This one can run various flavors of Linux, of which I would suggest Armbian or DietPI.

https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&...

https://www.armbian.com/

https://dietpi.com/

This one is more dedicated to networking, however it runs the proprietary RouterOS, although OpenWRT was ported with success.

https://mikrotik.com/product/rbm33g

https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/mikrotik_rbm33g

if you don't intend to mess with hardware, just get any random Intel atom mini-pc, you can get them for way under $100.

these things will give you like 5KB/s in bandwidth, and that's after spending months figuring out how to get networking working on them. (I am assuming you have no embedded computing experience here)

In fact scratch that, none of these even have enough resources to handle TLS/SSL for one connection.

How do you mean? Like, HTTP?

Mainly ssh but http would be good too

Running SSH would be ridiculously slow. HTTP, a bit less slow. HTTPS slow as molasses again.

If you don't care about security telnet in the clear would be usable. (Because that's what we really really need: millions of embedded systems accessed by Telnet. EHLO!)

HTTPS shouldn't be any slower. The encryption is transparent to the proxy.

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