Comment by jvolkman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jvolkman | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I use a small, passively cooled x86 box with 6 1GbE ports that I found on AliExpress. Wrote about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/hzvfih/new_router_...

It's got a quad-core i5. I run Proxmox and virtualize VyOS as a router, Home assistant, and a couple of other small things like an https reverse proxy for various services that I like to access remotely.

Went this route after my old OpenWRT router couldn't keep up with gigabit WAN. This box has no problems doing so, and even does WireGuard at near wire speed.

There are a bunch of similar units available on Aliexpress, as well as 1U units with x86 CPUs and SFP ports for 10GbE, etc.

I recommend PC Engines if you want something with a bit more support:

https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

They’re small passively cooled embedded x86 machines. They haven’t made the jump to 10GBit, and their newest model (the apu2) is getting pretty old. However, they have very long production timeframes (many years) for each board config, which leads to stability over time.

as you said, it's an embedded solution, and it's cpu power is borderline for gige speeds, if you want more than the bare minimum (fw/nat) like qos, dpi or some virtualized services.

Have you looked at DANOS?

I have an ER4 which works for now but plan to go down the custom route once the ER4 is unable to push packets quickly enough. My hope is that VyOS/DANOS is sufficiently stable by then to run as a VM on say a Odroid H2+ replacement (or something similar)

Vyos has been sufficiently stable for a while now. Just depends on what version you want to run.

I know quite a few companies that use it in production.

Does this type of setup support a mesh network with multiple APs and SSIDs, VLANs, etc? I have never seen a PC based all-in-one interface that supports all of these things the way Unifi does...

Not really. These don't make great APs; the wifi radio is in client mode.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com