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Comment by alias_neo | Hacker News Reader

It's great to see so many different alternative Router OSs.

I have a pile of routers, more than a dozen, which have stopped being updated and just basically abandoned by their manufacturers, well within their functional life, and many of them expensive, £100+ "pro home (wifi) routers".

For some time I used a variety of OpenWRT(LEDE)[0], DDWrt[1], Tomato, PFSense[2], OPNSense[3] and others, because CVEs in my edge-router / firewall isn't something I'm keen on.

I use an Ubiquiti EdgeRouter now, but I'm looking to move to a perhaps PCEngines + OPNSense for my next replacement.

[0]https://openwrt.org/ [1]https://dd-wrt.com/ [2]https://www.pfsense.org/ [3]https://opnsense.org/

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PCEngines are all out of stock for quite some time: https://www.pcengines.ch/newshop.php?c=4

I found out after my APU2 bit the dust last month. Though that's what I get for running it in a room that routinely gets to 35C/95F in the summer months. Lasted years so I still recommend, just don't put it somewhere stupid like me. Running a spare Celeron J1900 ITX board paired with a dual GbE NIC in the meantime.

Interesting, that's a pretty big window.

How was performance, could it handle Gigabit WAN? Would/have you run OPNSense on it?

I was considering an apu2e4 because I'd like something more open (coreboot) than the other hardware I have to hand.

I only have 100Mb FiOS and it handles that just fine. I'm not sure if it can handle gigabit. It ran OPNsense and acted as a basic router and dyndns, nothing fancy. My only real advice is to use an mSATA disk and not SD. My first install ran from a 32GB Sandisk SD card which died after a year.

If and when I buy a new APU I plan on running OpenBSD and learn to setup PF proper and roll my own router (A friend runs such a setup and loves it). At this point I just want a standard OS.

I don't run SDs for anything important. I've had a dozen RPis in my home rack alongside the "serious" hardware so I've killed my fair share if microSDs.

I'm not very familiar with OpenBSD, have run FreeBSD for a while, would certainly be fun to play around with a router based on a standard OS and not have to worry about proprietary updates like with the EdgeRouter any more.

That was my first and last important thing running off SD. And I too have had a few uSDs die in RPis. Though at work I have a Beckhoff PLC in a machine with a uSD running in a control cabinet. Still running fine after 2.5 years and I've not heard of issues with them. I'll have to find out which brand it is.

I run both FreeBSD and OpenBSD. FreeBSD for recently built home server as it has first class zfs support, bhyve works well, and excellent docs. OpenBSD as I know a few hard core users, and I've been using it on old hardware for years (have an imac G3 running it :). VPS for webcrap. OpenBSD is clean and they have good documentation as well. At the bottom of the following link is the pf router how-to I want to give a go, https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/

Thanks for the link, it's amazing that this is so thoroughly documented, I think I'm going to have to give it a go myself!

Yeah the APU2 handles gigabit no problem and the CPU is plenty fast. They have really nice intel NICs, see https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm. As you say, ships with coreboot.

I've been using APU2's for years (and before that APU and ALIX). The ALIX couldn't really saturate gigabit, but iirc even the APU could. Highly recommended.

I have an APU2 as the primary OPNSense router at home and picked up an HP T6xx thin client as a backup. There are a lot of small, low powered x86 boxes that will run OPNSense well but it is pretty common knowledge so prices have risen.

The current goto is commercial display PCs with multiple NICs otherwise there are some great micro PCs e.g. Qotom.

I currently have OPNSense running on a small x86 box, it's sitting inside my network though and providing a secondary network for access to some buddies for "SaaS" I run from home for our projects.

I really want a PCEngines APU specifically for my edge router though, mainly for coreboot and potentially failover to cellular, and it fits nicely in 1u too.

Speaking of PCEngines, about a month ago I read a blog post about a personal project involving a prototype APU with an optical port and other improvements, but I can't find anymore.

Does anyone know more?

Surprised you didn't mention VyOS. EdgeRouterOS is based on Vyatta. VyOS is a continuation of that.

It was in there originally, I messed up copy pasting bits back and forth and left it out, but yet, VyOS/Vyatta is a great one.

For asus routers, there is https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/ as well.

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