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mongol

Some day I hope there will be a Raspberry Pi with two network interfaces.

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"Some day I hope there will be a Raspberry Pi with two network interfaces."

You can do this right now with an CM4 attached to the seeed studios dual ethernet carrier:

https://www.seeedstudio.com/Rapberry-Pi-CM4-Dual-GbE-Carrier...

There is a Banana Pi variant with five network interfaces: https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Getting_Started_with_R1

I like the pcengines apu2, which I use as routers. They're also standard x64.

pcengines is as good as it gets for DIY whitebox router. Their prices are really good too, $100-150 USD for very capable high efficiency x64. https://www.pcengines.ch/newshop.php?c=4

They look mostly OOS, wouldn't a nice old x64 laptop be just as capable for cheaper? I see this in the same catagory of the smart clocks, its just a rebranded withered technology (nintendo term). Love the simple site though!

Old x64 laptops are great, and I've certainly used one as a router before, however they do have drawbacks (cooling profile is usually shitty for 24/7 use, and they often don't love to be stripped from their shell, lose their display and etc). A laptop generally does not have all the peripheral chipsets and connectors you want and usually has extra stuff you don't want.

For $120ish I'm not sure you could beat the value prop of one of these boards with a used laptop. Supply is certainly an issue and was even before COVID. Waiting until 2022 sucks, but I'd argue they are by far the best overall option for a DIY whitebox router I've personally seen.

I don't think there is a problem with stripping it from the display (I dont think its necessary or even desireable most of the time for negligible space differences), it comes with a free UPS and is usually "free"), the idle power consumption is rather low (x240 with screen on is 4w on idle http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/which-lenovo-laptop-...) my requirements for a device are way lower than those devices listed. I sometimes think of devices such as whiteboxes as marketed tools, like the smart clocks that just look like stripped phones to me, or VR that are just dual phone screens.

If you like x64, nothing can beat the odroid H2+ :) if you can ever get one... 2x 2.5gb ports. And really cheap.

Could a laptop beat it? I am thinking of using some old laptops like this if they are better than the router I am using with custom firmware.

I'm not an expert but I would say it's probably pretty hard to find a laptop with 2 Ethernet ports, and 2.5Gb Ethernet with that. Also the H2 is passively cooled which is not going to be the case for most laptop. And it's also tiny and energy efficient. It's really an amazing deal. Too bad the semiconductor crisis seems to have killed it for now :(

If PC Engines are too slow for you, check out ProtecLi boxes.

Wow, really neat. Thanks for the rec

How does this compare to a router with custom firmware like Tomato/DD-WRT?

I use this. Best Router ever. Never will use something different anymore

I've been lately drooling for Solid-Run ClearFog CX LX2. 4x10Gbe + 1x100Gbe should be enough for anyone, and pretty hefty ARM CPU is an additional bonus.

Yes, its absolute overkill for any sort of hobbyist use, and its not cheap. But it certainly has potential to be a networking powerhouse.

A single 2.5Gbps or 5Gbps NIC would be better IMHO.

For router on a stick use? Or for other purpose?

Both. It's just more flexible than two 1GbE NICs.

You can push 1Gbps through a usb3 ethernet adapter.

I tried on my rock64 and only got ~900 Mbps haha. Rpi CPU is beefier, though.

Yes there a a bunch of good rk3328 based board with 2 Gb eth ports. If you need something beefier there is the rk3399 based boards (pine64's rockpro64 has only a single Ethernet port but there is for example the nanopi r4s which has 2).

I'm not sure what's the heat is like if you do gigabit NAT with them though :)

This RK3568 board looks interesting, but I have no idea if "firefly" is any decent vendor; that is generally the problem with these random chinese boards.

https://en.t-firefly.com/product/industry/rocrk3568pc.html

RK3568 has 2xGbe built-in, and the board has additionally a Wifi 6 chip (broadcom), seems like pretty ideal router platform to me. There are even some hints that it might have half-decent mainline support, but who knows really though..

https://pine64.com/product-category/single-board-computers/ Try pine64 if you must, they release hardware for the software community to add features. You can just use a spare laptop with less cost, more performance, and neglegible energy cost differences unless your electric bills are very high rates.

Did you miss the part where this subthread was about boards with 2 (or more) network interfaces? none of the pine64 boards fill that basic criteria

Yes I did not see that sorry.

Radxa rock pi 3 is an rk3568 board I think. Although I don't think it has two ports :/

There is friendlyarm nanopi R2S and R4S or orangepi r1 plus (which looks like a copy of the R2S).

Can always add another network interface via USB and the RPi4 has USB3 if you need the thruput.

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