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Comment by szszrk | Hacker News Reader

Are additional RAM gigabytes anything important for a switch? Especially one that delivers on the parameters?

Does BPI-R2 actually supports those distributions, or rather those distributions "can run" on that hardware? That's a difference. OpenWRT can be run on Mikrotik, yet Mikrotik doesn't support that. OpenBSD runs on Edgerouter, yet I doubt they support that. Will anyone that I will buy BPI-R2 from, fix my "normal distribution" if it fails to detect some hardware, or with a failed upgrade?

It's an awesome device but I think we are confusing a few important things here. Like the word "support" for a start.

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Broadly speaking, I would not rely too much on support from manufacturers but rather by the communities when the projects are stable enough. Manufacturers have the tendency to slow or halt support in a few years because it costs them money, or to push newer products, while communities support usually lasts much longer.

For example, the NanoPi NEO Core official images all still use a 4.14 kernel (2017-2018), while the ones at Armbian use the current mainline 5.10.

https://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO_Core#...

https://www.armbian.com/nanopi-neo/

> Are additional RAM gigabytes anything important for a switch? Especially one that delivers on the parameters?

For a switch, probably not. But it does open up a bunch of possibilities for some constrained environments.

I would use such a thing combined with a few other services aside from pure network switching. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking running pi-hole and Home Assistant.

Why? Because I live in a studio apartment, and it would be a single, small and quiet box. I'm currently doing this on a mini-ITX J3455, and while the setup is broadly OK, I'd love to be able to remove the switch I have lying around. Also, the integrated Realtek controllers suck, and I can't replace them with anything better (there's no PCIe port).

Of course, your other points absolutely matter, and are the reason why I'm still looking around for quiet x86 machines that I could expand.

I didn't quite determine if you have a solution or are looking for a solution, but a Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB with a passive fanless heatsink case can run Pi-Hole and Home Assistant without breaking a sweat. I use a FLIRC case.

I'm still investigating possible solutions.

I also want to do some routing on a gigabit link, so the RPI doesn't scratch that itch. I'm also not comfortable with the various horror stories I've heard about SD cards dying in Pis (although I've run one with home assistant for several years with no issues).

I'd also like to avoid running external drives, the goal being to have a self-contained unit. I'd rather have a larger unit instead of multiple small ones that require cabling (mostly for esthetic reasons) and various dongles.

I did this for a few years in a genero small router passively cooled form factor PC from China. Celeron with discrete Intel NICs. Ran PfSense.

Worked great until it died a few months back. Now it’s less expensive to just buy the equivalent Netgate appliance. It’s been great.

> OpenBSD runs on Edgerouter

Glad to hear this. I went checking [0], and there's still a speed bump for me: mine is the PoE version, and its switch ports are not supported yet. The PoE version is also an orphan with respect to OpenWRT.

If switch and PoE support can be worked out, that may a way forward for my router.

[0] https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html

It would be horribly slow though.

Yup. There's a lot of hardware offloading going on inside when running the stock firmware. Something like this board, or a dual-NIC mini-PC, and a surplus PoE switch, might be a better choice.

It's banana-ware. Ripens at the customer. Avoid!

It won’t help with switching, but it is good for routing/fw + running real software.

I just run a Netgate appliance for that plus something less flaky than OpenWRT.

I also wonder what actual speeds you can get out of these NICs. So many cheap gigabit NICs aren’t really up to the task. And I’d guess that the switch plane runs at 1 gigabit total here.

> OpenBSD runs on Edgerouter

I think the OS is a fork of Vyatta, so it should be Linux.

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