Comment by jacob019 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacob019 | Hacker News Reader

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The R4S is a great little device. Love the solid metal case, tiny size, and low power usage. I used one to route my gigabit Ethernet for several months. Compiled OpenWRT from source with LibreELEC's patches. No hardware problems for me--I did apply that voltage patch for the MicroSD. It handled the connection well, but couldn't quite push full gigabit PPPoE with VLAN. Gets close if you enable acceleration, but then no AQM. CenturyLink requires you to tunnel IPv6, so that on top of the PPPoE was a bit much for it, I could only IPv6 at about 300mbps. No eMMC, you have to provide a MicroSD, but OpenWRT doesn't write to the flash at all in normal operation, so that was fine.

Now I have upgraded to the R5S. This thing has HDMI out, dual 2.5Gbps + 1x Gigabit Ethernet, and eMMC. It was a bit difficult to acquire, but I'm very happy with it. I can max out the Gigabit WAN now, with AQM which really helps. IPv6 reaches over 750mbps, and the R5S has cycles to spare, so I think that's the full speed. I can saturate the link over wireguard tunnels too.

The R4S is up on eBay now.

Do you have good source for OpenWRT for R5S? I have one sitting on my desk, but trying to get nice clean version of OpenWRT has been taking more time than I was hoping.

I'm ashamed to admit that I was lazy this time, just used their FriendlyWRT build and then debloated. It's easy enough to disable all the packages, but a proper OpenWRT build would be preferable and you could be more confident that it is secure. You should be able to apply the patches from their github repo and build your own OpenWRT image. It was easy when I did it for the R4S (now I think it's supported upstream). The OpenWRT build system is very nice and easy.

> The OpenWRT build system is very nice and easy

In general I agree, it is pretty nice. The thing I'm struggling with right now is getting kernel config right as I'm attempting to do a build with 6.0 but the configs from OpenWRT-5.15 do not work directly with that (or I'm doing something wrong...). The difficulty is that the kernel config seems to be done in layers in a way, assembling and the merging the final config from different sources and its not completely obvious where to poke to make it work. I don't think its insurmountable, but just takes some effort to figure out the build system etc. Especially as I'm trying to do things the "right" way instead of just trying to patch up something bootable.

Yeah, I’ve built FriendlyWRT for the R5S. It’s reasonably doable in an afternoon, depending on skill level. FriendlyWRT, or at least the sources for it, is just a few minor configuration tweaks for performance + default packages.

http://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/How_to_Build_Fri...

Exactly, though I would rather restore the default OpenWRT package selection and branding. Hopefully the device support will land upstream soon.

The R6S has a hardware AV1 decoder that can do 4k@60 over HDMI 2.1; might be a good media machine with Kodi...

Would the R5S be a good candidate to install a pfSense or OPNSense firewall?

No doubt the R6S would make a great media machine, a bit expensive though. The RK3588 looks like an awesome procesor. It suports dual monitors too. I'm hoping to use the Orange Pi 5 as a desktop when it comes out.

With built-in wifi and bluetooth orange pi 5 seems to be a better candidate for media, and R6S for firewall.

Firewall is the intended purpose for the R6S, but honestly it's overkill unless you have a multi-gigabit link.

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