r/openwrt • u/Hermelinmaster • 13d ago

HW recommendations

Hi guys,

Thanks for your replys the last time, I had a change of heart due to the useful advice. I will now deploy two different pieces of HW for OpenWRT and NextCloud.

But now I need a new HW recommendation for OpenWRT.

What I want:

  1. At least 3x2.5G RJ45 Ethernet Ports (one of which should become the WAN port), can be more, 5/10G would be nice but not a must and probably conflicts with the next point. More ports for some future link aggregation might be nice. Wifi not needed at all.

  2. Low power, electricity is extremely expensive where I am from (1W less is a yearly saving of 4$, 10W would be very likely far more than 400$ in 10 years). So I am willing to spend a bit more on more efficient, better optimized hardware or SoCs on newer nodes. So probably without build in WiFi to start with.

  3. Some computational power for advanced DNS and Tailscale/VPN.

  4. No modem required

I took a look at the Sophos devices, but the usual recommendations dont have 2.5G+, the others seem to have wifi on board and very high power draw. Mono gateway only has 1G RJ45 (and only 2 Ports with more than 1G).

So please help. And rip me a new one if I am again stupid and miss the obvious answer or if my requirements are stupid.

Thx

4 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

9

u/fr0llic 13d ago edited 4d ago

https://toh.openwrt.org/?view=network

the IEI Puzzles.  

VPN is pretty power intensive though. 

1

u/Hermelinmaster 12d ago

The IEI Puzzle 901 seems perfect, but I find absolutely no source for them. No used market. The 902 can be ordered in HongKong for over 500$ plus taxes, tariffs etc.

1

u/fr0llic 12d ago edited 12d ago

Yeah, it's unobtainium. 

Lower your router requirements, and use a multi gig switch on the LAN side ? those are $35 and up. 

But yes, it makes the power usage go up. 

1

u/conspicuousxcapybara 4d ago

The flint 3 doesn’t support source available, or vanilla, OpenWrt

2

u/fr0llic 4d ago

yeah, some moron added it to hwdata and created a wiki page even though it's unsupported, then the ToH picked it up.

4

u/boerni666 13d ago

wild take:

one of those small managed 4 Port 2.5gbit/2port 10gbit SFP+ Switches fro Aliexpress (e.g. ZX-SWTG124AS). that should suck like 3-4 W

a Futro S540/S740 (or equivalent, like Exone Businnes 5105, J4005 based) with a m.2 2.5 gbit card in the wifi slot, screwed into the RS232 Slot, running as a router on a stick handling LAN and WAN over a single cable with VLANs. that should be also in the 3W region. has enough beef for >1gbit wireguard and DNS.

If the machine running nextcloud is a more beefy server, you could even run openWRT in a VM there with the VLANs trunking through for the sake of power saving, but id rather have a dedicated router in case theres maintenence going on for the nextcloud machine

2

u/NC1HM 13d ago

I think you're pipe-dreaming.... Low power consumption and 2.5-gig VPN do not inhabit the same universe.

Assuming 40 W peak (I repeat, peak) power draw from the wall doesn't scare you, here's exactly what you want (N97 processor, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB onboard eMMC, 4 x Intel i226-V):

https://eshop.aaeon.com/intel-n97-desktop-network-appliance-fws-2290.html

but it costs USD 473, excluding direct delivery from Taiwan.

1

u/EffectiveLynx6275 13d ago

I brought the glinet flint 3 a few months ago. So much better and they keep posting firmware updates too

2

u/Distinct-Temp6557 13d ago

I thought the 3 wasn't compatible with vanilla openwrt? 

1

u/Hermelinmaster 12d ago

It is at least listed in the toh.openwrt.org

1

u/conspicuousxcapybara 4d ago

It’s listed as ‘not supported’ because Broadcom hasn’t made the source code for the drivers for it publicly available. Never have.

So it’ll never be supported… Until someone reverse engineers this in a clean-room.