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Comment by megous | Hacker News Reader

Broadcom wifi chips on these SBCs work sort of fine in ac mode (you can maybe get ~150mbit/s in practice), but it could be much better.

Anyway, it so nice to have a router with 8GiB ram or 32GiB storage, instead of these ram/storage starved devices that are sold as wifi routers usually that can barely support openwrt. Being able to use Arch Linux or Debian, and the latest mainline kernel and have replaceable storage is just so much more flexible in what you can do.

I'll be trying Quartz64-A with some well supported 3x3 or 2x2 mimo PCIe wifi cards, soon. (Router use excludes Intel Wifi cards, sadly) I hope that will be an amazing wifi router for me. I already run one as a non-wifi router: https://megous.com/dl/tmp/599ba099a6893863.png (well there's a USB wifi card visible there, but that's just a secondary wifi network for untrusted devices, I'd like something much better for my primary wifi)

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> Being able to use Arch Linux or Debian, and the latest mainline kernel and have replaceable storage is just so much more flexible in what you can do.

To be fair, my current OpenWRT devices are running more up to date kernels (5.4) than my Debian-based (4.x) devices at home.

And for a router I really don't need/want more code than strictly necessary. What use is 8GBs for the system, if it all it can do is load extra services, which will starve the RAM of the device and make runtime performance less predictable?

What can you do with your 8GB+ router compared to mine 32MB?

OpenWrt is a nightmare to update due to the space constraints. A more traditional distro can just be updated via the usual package manager commands. I believe OpenWrt expects you to back up configs and reimage the whole thing.

What are you talking about?

There’s literally a sysupgrade-image you can use to update in place without losing your config.

Has it been a while since you used OpenWRT last time?

Since I used it? No. Running it on many things. Upgraded it? Yeah. I've done a lot of fresh installs but don't usually upgrade the system because it doesn't seem trivial compared to running one command occasionally on the rolling release distros I'm used to. What you're describing is unknown to me. It sounds a bit OpenBSD-like, maybe. I also consider OpenBSD to be unreasonably annoying to upgrade (although it's been a while since I tried with that either, I heard it got better).

You can always just “opkg upgrade” if that’s your cup of tea.

That won’t necessarily update the kernel-image though which is often stored directly on some MTD-partitions, so flashing the sysupgrade image is the recommended approach if you want to make sure everything is up to date.

And it’s literally just uploading one firmware file to one web-ui. It’s not like it’s hard to do it particularly involved or time-consuming.

If you’ve been using OpenWRT at all I’m kinda surprised you’ve actually been able to miss them.

They’re pretty much front and center in the firmware download pages and referenced in every single release note, more or less.

My router runs Linux 5.15. I can cache more stuff in RAM, instead of wearing out the flash storage, or having to throw useful data away (http cache, larger DNS cache). I can use all the new stuff that's added to the Linux kernel's networking stack. I can use any scripting labguages, to automate things like updating my DNS servers easily. I compile my own kernel for the router, so I can disable anything I don't like, all the barely used and less tested protocols I don't need, etc.

Minimal Arch Linux is quite small. But I have option to to install anything, and the board will support it, without me having to figure out workarounds.

The board has 4 cores, you can dedicate 1 to the routing, and use the rest for whatever without starving the core functions of the router of the resources.

I mean, it's just a lot more flexible, while being cheaper and easier to replace than dedicated routers, when the HW breaks. Just copy the root filesystem to other uSD card, and swap the kernel, and it will run the same on a different ARM SBC, which I have quite a lot laying around in my home.

> Being able to use Arch Linux or Debian, and the latest mainline kernel and have replaceable storage is just so much more flexible in what you can do.

Why not use dedicated router/firewall software like pfsense, OPNSense, or Untangle (all BSD-based, Untangle is a paid product though)?

I bought a little NUC with an Intel CPU and NICs to run pfSense a few months ago and it's been fantastically stable.

I replaced microtik router with this, because it was annoying to have to run an odd duck that I always have to keep figuring how to manage differently, or how to workaround its defficiencies, because it doesn't run a reguar OS, but some dedicated thing for routing. It's much easier to me to do more complicated things, the manufacturer didn't add UI for on a general distro, than on some special purpose OS.

+ now I run the same OS on the router I run on 12 other server machines at home. This is just easier to manage and backup, and replace with any other SBC that I have at home, regardless of the model as long as it has an ethernet port.

I've been using one of the miniPC type OpenWRT supported devices as my core router. Though rather than adding wifi to the base I dangled my old wifi with OpenWRT off of it since my theory of instability on routers is that wifi makes everything suck.

https://pcengines.ch/apu3c2.htm

Yes, I have similar setup. I used microtik wifi router previously, and it's still a primary wifi ap for me, but all ports are bridged together including a wan port, and it now just serves as a 5xGLAN switch + wifi ap. All the DHCP, DNS and other services are on Quartz64.

> Router use excludes Intel Wifi cards, sadly

Why? Do you have any other manufacturer you could recommend for a reasonable price? What are you using for your Quartz?

Why would you buy an expensive card that doesn't allow AP mode on anything ac or ax?

"Hello IAmMrZ

Thank you for your patience in this matter.

After checking this further, we would like to inform you that the engineering team confirmed that Intel® wireless products follow regulatory compliance and it is expected that AP mode cannot be enabled in non-2.4 GHz channels. We hope this clarifies your concerns.

Best regards,

Andrew G.

Intel Customer Support Technician"

https://community.intel.com/t5/Wireless/Intel-AX210-Gentoo-L...

I'll be trying realtek 8822ce and 8852ae based pcie cards, using mainline Linux rtw88/89 drivers.

Qualcomm based cards are also quite common in high end wifi routers. But they are pricey.

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