Router suggestion

[melloa]

About a year ago I set up a wireless bridge using DD-WRT and a wireless router I picked up at a yard sale for $1. It's still going strong. :D

Yeap ... DD-WRT is great. The only problem is that it is limited by the router's hardware, so "disk" space, memory, etc, isn't upgradable. Moved to pf using them as AP, until got my UniFis ...

 

[jgreco]

I haven't heard a lot about them, but what I have heard about the Edgerouters has generally been favorable. If I'm not mistaken, @jgreco has some experience with them. I'm running a pfSense box, which works well and doesn't draw much power, but it doesn't sound like you're interested in that.

Nothing seems to do QOS well without quite a bit of tinkering. This includes the EdgeRouters, which I'll toss out some commentary on.

The EdgeRouter-X is the cheapest in the Ubiquiti lineup, and it is a great little general purpose low speed router. It has a faster CPU, more ports, and is about half the cost (~$50) of its bigger brother, but it does NOT have accelerated packet processing capabilities. Because of the faster CPU, I think it may be better at things like VPN.

The EdgeRouter Lite is a ~$100 3-port affair that will do full wire-speed routing (and I'm pretty sure wire-speed NAT'ing as well) which is a great choice especially if you have an Internet connection greater than 100Mbps.

They both have web management portals that allow you to do basic firewall and VPN stuff without too much drama. For the more experienced user, they are Vyatta based routers with a CLI.

If you're buying Unifi gear, that is, the Ubiquiti wifi stuff, then there's also the USG Unifi Security Gateway to consider, which is an EdgeRouter Lite that's been extended with additional firmware features to do deep packet inspection. I haven't figured out what is so "Security" about it, since it seems to basically be a fixed-configuration NAT platform with DPI, but it does create some very impressive stats and insights into your network if you're a home user.

And as for UniFi wifi gear, if you're not cost-sensitive, and especially if you can run wire for multiple access points, look at this. Most people buy one of these stupid all-in-one "router" affairs, and then maybe try for wireless bridges or wireless mesh, but that's basically going to be disappointing. In the old days with 802.11b, you could probably have a single AP that covered an entire house without too much trouble, but the new 802.11ac really requires that you have an access point near you if you want to be able to get "good speeds". The Ubiquiti AP AC Pro's are something like $600 for a 5-pack. Ubiquiti will be happy to sell you a Unifi switch and a Unifi USG that all magically works together and gives you lots of cool stats and options, but you don't actually need those bits... just the AP's and a VM running the Unifi management software. Put access points all around your house at strategic points and run wire back to your switch. There's no comparison between wireless mesh and a real wired AP setup.

Still, in my old age here, I've found I just don't have the hours in the day to roll custom stuff for friends and family anymore, so I've been leaning heavily on Ubiquiti as the preferred go-to. The Unifi USG, a decent PoE ethernet switch, and a bunch of wired access points can give you an extremely high performance home network at a relatively low cost.

 

[yottabit]

Routerboard. Meets all of your requirements, is standalone, ridiculously cheap, low power, and high quality.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk

 

[yottabit]

And here's my QoS script you can use as an example. Note there is also web interface, and a Windows control application (also runs in wine, and wine bottler for Mac). You can enter the CLI script or follow along in the UI.

https://docs.google.com/a/jacobmcdo...V2MSJFxda_Ult-MORiRqjW-jZj8/edit?usp=drivesdk

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk

 

[yottabit]

And since this is FreeNAS, it's worth mentioning I did get RouterOS running in bhyve just fine in Corral. Haven't tried it yet in 11.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk

 

[darkwarrior]

Hey there,

I was going through the same questioning a few months ago. I was looking for speedy fiber-capable dual-Wan router that would also be able to handle some VPN workloads.
During my research I was considering the "Soho"/Small Business line-up (around 150-200€) from Netgear,D-Link,LinkSys and Cisco (I already own a RV220W and it was not the best purchase I ever made). And I also use pfSense in a VM, but did not want to use that as my Internet gateway...

That's why I finally went with an EdgeRouter Lite (~100€ over here) and I'm very happy with it. :D
It's a discreet small fanless 3-port device (so Dual-wan is available out of the box) that is drawing max. 7W.
General performance is very good, the webinterface is very nice looking (better than pfSense, Cisco, Linksys IMO) and it's a nice toy to play with. For now I can't really speak about VPN performance since I'm currently having a 2Mbit ADSL line ... :(
Additionally, the community on the Ubiquity boards seems to be also quite helpful.

Now, I will keep an eye open for the Ubiquity products because all their line-up is integrating with each other very nicely and might even buy some other stuff.

 

[jgreco]

Routerboard. Meets all of your requirements, is standalone, ridiculously cheap, low power, and high quality.

However, most of them are also relatively low performance. Ubiquiti has probably been peeing their pants with glee for years over this Tolly report:

https://dl.ubnt.com/Tolly212128UbiquitiEdgeRouterLitePricePerformanceVsMikroTik.pdf

which is mostly a reflection on Ubiquiti's use of the Cavium accelerated packet processing, and seems to hold true relative to today's offerings such as the RB2011iL-IN which offers a lot more ports than the EdgeRouter Lite, at a similar price point, but you pay for that in performance, where the EdgeRouter Lite can route more than a million packets per second, and the RouterBoard product is less than a quarter of that. Of course, since that time, Ubiquiti introduced the EdgeRouter-X, which also lacks the accelerated packet processing, and which I don't really recommend on that basis.

RouterBoard does sport a nicer selection of offerings, and as you get out of their "ridiculously cheap" tier, you start to get up into real router territory. Their top-of-the-line CCR1036-8G-2S+EM is a great-looking device for a hardware assisted software routing product.

As router vendors seem to be focusing silicon at higher end 40G/100G products, I'm disappointed that we're not really seeing any solid solutions down here in 10G land. Some of us still build infrastructure at 10G (or even 1G!) and the 10G arena definitely benefits from doing ACL and forwarding in silicon. I suppose at some point we'll see the equivalent of the EdgeRouter Lite for 10G and then I guess I can stop caring.

 

[jgreco]

Additionally, the community on the Ubiquity boards seems to be also quite helpful.

Now, I will keep an eye open for the Ubiquity products because all their line-up is integrating with each other very nicely and might even buy some other stuff.

In re-skimming this thread, I wanted to point out that there's a difference between Ubiquiti products, which includes stuff like the EdgeRouters, and the Ubiquiti Unifi line of products, which is a very specific subset. The Unifi stuff is designed to work together, and is probably aimed at SOHO, SMB, motels, and similar smallish-scale deployments. I'm pretty sure Ubiquiti hopes that a solution provider goes to a customer site, and says "here's the Unifi USG" (which is ~$10-$20 more than the EdgeRouter Lite for what appears to be mostly software differences) and "here's our Unifi PoE mini switch" which is somewhat more expensive than a similar Netgear, and then several of their Unifi AP's, which at around $120/each are amazing.

While the USG appears to be a custom-firmware EdgeRouter, everything that I can tell suggests that it is just configured as a basic NAT gateway, and then they mostly use the Cavium accelerated packet processing for traffic categorization, I suspect. The Unifi controller gives you what appears, at the top level, to be a nice enterprise-style SPOG interface, but it doesn't take too long to drill down through that to find that there isn't too much under it all. Still, this is a hell of a thing to have especially on a home network and double-especially at the relatively low price.

You will not get the nice integration if you go with the non-Unifi actual EdgeRouter gear. And I wanted to make sure that this is clear.

 

[darkwarrior]

Yes, indeed you can't use the UniFi software to manage Edge* products ... Would have been cute to have a nice dashboard with all the ubiquiti products, but that's not possible with that piece of software.
There are many other products who allow you to do that.

Nevertheless, I still like the line-up, functionalities offered and the bang for buck ;)