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Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome. I had always had a travel/pocket wi-fi router since a long-long time. Started from the likes of D-Link, TP-Link, etc and now my next target is to check out one from GL•iNet[1]. They are flashable with OpenWRT. Their Beryl AX[2] looks spicy.

I find the benefit of a router with you when traveling are;

- More secure (you can set it up the way you want).

- Your device(s) do not need to be configured to work and sync.

- Better wi-fi coverage.

PS. I have no relationship with GL•iNet. They just seem to be the most ideal from all the reviews I have stumbled on so far.

1. https://www.gl-inet.com/

2. https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt3000/

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Using a mesh of Glinet routers (GL-AXT1800) and Wireguard across residential points of presence. Nothing but good things to say about them, use one to bridge between a Starlink gen2 dishy and clients when mobile (fail closed VPN). iOS app is good, optional cloud mgmt portal also good. My only regret is I wish they offered a 1U half depth rack mount SKU.

Don't get the Mango (GL-MT300N-V2), it is cute but woefully underpowered for anything but the most light throughput.

(also no relation, just a satisfied customer)

I'm a big fan of https://www.supernetworks.org for the flexibility it gives. The security focus is a bonus as well.

Its important to note their firmware and especially their cloud infrastructure should absolutely not be trusted. Their hardware is probably fine, so just flash OpenWRT.

I got the GL.iNet GL-MT3000 (Beryl AX) a while ago and it's exactly what I needed.

I used to carry around a Huawei 4G router, but it required its own wall wart and couldn't bridge to another wifi. So if the 4G coverage was crap, we had to use public hotel wifis, meaning I had to configure 6-10 devices to use the crappy portaled network.

With the Beryl AX I get:

  - Wifi-bridging. The Beryl has its own network, our devices connect to it and I can wrangle it to any public network
  - Ad-blocking, global DNS via nextdns, Mullvad VPN, Tailscale, all built in and work with just one click.
  - Internet failover if I have multiple active connections (wifi + 4g for example
  - Standard USB power input

What I lost was the 4G connectivity, BUT it has an USB port and I use an old Android phone with a data plan on it. Used the developer menu to make it always default to tethering when an USB cable is connected and it's pretty much fire and forget.

(It's also on sale for around 100€ for Black Friday, well worth it)

I've used their GL-AR300M model for a few years quite happily.

Very flexible, i.e. wifi interface and two wired interfaces, and can mix and match roles however you like (e.g. wired uplink & downlink, wifi up/wired down, wired up/wifi down etc), combined with the ability to terminate a VPN on the device.

(Possibly my most silly use was to provide a network connection via a phone wifi hotspot to a wired network appliance).

And size-wise it's about half the size of a cigarette packet. (Yeah - that feels like quite an odd size comparison...)

Do they use a different fork/package for AdGuard home?

I'm asking this because the smaller models from them are limited to 32MB flash and 128/256MB RAM, which is way too less for typical AdGuard Home usage.

Personally I'm using some older Linksys WRT 1900AC/3200ACM models for my malware homelab and for the 1900AC the AdGuard daemon is constantly OOM once a few blocklists are selected.

Does anybody maybe know whether there's a fork that uses less memory and skips all the statistics and stuff that you won't need?

Last time I had a glance only their stronger models had adguard built in from factory. Likely for reasons you mentioned.

This isn't an issue with needing a fork that uses less memory. You're loading hundreds of thousands, if not millions of urls into memory so they can be compared to every single dns request happening. Text, even compressed, requires a certain amount of bytes to store, and there is no way to use less memory beyond that point, it's literally, physically impossible. Are there memory gains in adguard? Probably. But I doubt enough to magically make your 128MB of memory defy physics and hold more than 128MB of bytes. Doesn't matter what those bytes are, or how efficiently you made them, that physical rock can only ever handle 128MB of those bytes

Well, you could implement an LPM trie that focusses on FQDN labels; for example. Which would greatly reduce the memory usage compared to what AdGuard Home does currently with their per-rulelist-slices.

If you represent LPM tries as JSON and order them by alphabet, you'll get even benefits of gzip on HDD to save lots of space. Just a suggestion and how I would implement it with an eBPF module, not meant as a critic.

Like I said, even with compression, gzip in your example, you can only load up so much data into the physical ram modules. Reduce the list to domains and cut out dupes, minimize the schema, kick least recently used entries, do whatever you can to drop memory usage, but it's a n+1 problem if memory usage is linked to an unknown sized set of block lists. A buffered pager that streams from disk to shifts through the list as it iterates and checks is going to need to take place if you can't hold it all in memory. Though, even with limited memory, if you're reading off fast storage, like nvme, the small amount of memeory shouldn't really matter much, as even reading the files from disk should be plenty fast enough for your average internet connection imo

Also wanted to share about gl.inet.

I've used their other products (convexa) and was pretty happy about it.

The creta travel router offer power over ethernet too.

https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-ar750/

Creta (GL-AR750) is discontinued.

Agree, the GL Beryl works fantastic for my needs. Plus OpenVPN and WireGuard to where I need. A great travel router, used it as my main router while away from home staying in hotels for the better part of a year.

Regarding GL Beryl (and possibly other routers of theirs), it is worth mentioning that you get significantly higher throughput with WireGuard. Thus, if you have the option of hooking up via OpenVPN or WireGuard, do opt for the latter.

On the topic of GL.iNet. I have had a good experience with their customer support as we tried to work out some issues likely related to hardware. They were patient and allowed me to swap between routers until we got it to work. Oddly the final solution was to put an unmanaged switch so that we had two switches separated by about 30 metres of Cat 6A Ethernet cable, rather than plugging it straight into the router. According to the specification, this should not be an issue from what I can tell. Still, given how helpful and patient their support were, the whole experience still leaves me as a happy customer - despite the obvious hack.

Make sure you have a good AC adapter and cable. Mine it's the GL-MT300N (v2) and I keep on missing the signal (although it's not rebooting). Not the proper voltage or amps might be the reason.

interesting, I run the old model of the beryl on just about any old USB and it works fine

I am using a gl-inet router as a main router for my apartment. I picked it up on sale and it has been wonderful. Much better than the Linksys I got on sale 4+ years ago.

Same. I have been using one for 6 months now.

It has replaced the modem/router that my ISP gave me. I still use this modem/router with the Gl-inet which is set up in bridge mode.

It's stable. No WiFi flake outs. The only time I have had to reset it is when I have updated the firmware.

Eventually I plan to switch to a pfsense based router and use the Gl-inet as a wifi access point when at home and a router when I am abroad. This way all my WiFi devices will work seamlessly.

What do you typically hook the router up to when traveling?

Not the person you are replying to. It's not unusual to find a working RJ45 in a hotel room, and as a bonus they often don't have a captive portal.

Otherwise you can usually set up a router to bridge one WiFi network to another. Sometimes the captive portal screen just works on your computer that you're connecting to your own router. Other times you can sign in while connected to the hotel WiFi, and then clone your machine's MAC address so the network thinks the router has already signed in.

My favorite hack is bridging a congested hotel 2.4GHz network to my own personal 5.8GHz network, which benefits everyone if you are a family about to light up 5-10 more devices.

The WiFi-to-WiFi bridge isn't always very efficient, especially if the router has to multiplex the two connections using a single antenna, but speed isn't always the top concern.

> My favorite hack is bridging a congested hotel 2.4GHz network to my own personal 5.8GHz network, which benefits everyone if you are a family about to light up 5-10 more devices.

I do the same thing. It's failed only once: the /24 address space in my "internal" network was the same as the /24 used by the hotel's network and I didn't think to chrck. I brought down the hotel's router.

This is a misconfiguration. Your private address space should not leak at all towards the hotel router side. If it brought down the hotel router it sounds like you had some kind of loop between the “private LAN” and the “WAN”.

Depending on if the NAT configuration in the router is fully correct, it should even fully work if both are the same.

1. Wired Ethernet Cable (RJ45). Almost all hotels have it. If you cannot find one, ask for it or ask right at the reception to give you a room with it. If on extended stays (Airbnb, Service Apartments), I plug one into the primary router to have my Wi-Fi. It is rare not to get one way or another to set this up. Carry one of those thin but lengthy RJ45s (such as the ones from Monoprice or Ubiquiti) with your router. They will fit well in your tech pouch.

2. Connect to the Wi-Fi, but run your own DHCP in the router to distribute your IPs to your devices.

References;

- https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=44504

- https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/accessories-cables-d...

Several years back I was staying at a hotel than made me re-authenticate through their portal (enter my name, room number, etc) every time I unlocked my phone. I happened to have an AirPort Express with me. I plugged that in, authenticated once, connected to my new WiFi network instead of the hotel WiFi, and was good for the rest of my trip. Using cellular internet wasn’t a great option at the time/location, so I was really happy I had the little pocket router with me.

The mikrotik ones have worked well for me.

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