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For my money, these days, there are two devices/ecosystems that stand head and shoulders above the rest: if you're an open source die-hard/have spare time, the
by frio 9y ago
For my money, these days, there are two devices/ecosystems that stand head and shoulders above the rest: if you're an open source die-hard/have spare time, the PCEngines APU2 is an excellent AMD+coreboot based router platform that you build yourself. If you're not strict about requiring open source, the Ubiquiti line is amazing. The Ubiquiti Unifi Security Gateway line in particular, for home or small business, is incredible.
For home, I've got an APU2c4 (http://pcengines.ch/apu2b4.htm http://pcengines.ch/apu2b4.htm), running LEDE. It pushes something near a gigabit pretty easily (and has a the bufferbloat patches!), and I've got the time needed to administer it when necessary.
For my folks, I grabbed an Ubiquiti Unifi Security Gateway (https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/) and a separate Ubiquiti AP AC Lite. I fired up a controller in the cloud, and now I can manage it remotely if there's ever a problem. It's pretty awesome :).
- Latty 9y agoI've been wanting to move away from standard consumer networking hardware for ages, because it all seems terrible in lots of different ways. The Unifi Security Gateway looked interesting until I googled a bit, no IPv6 support in 2018 at £100? That's insane. I mean, apparently you can do it manually, but bleh.
- frio 9y agoFrom what I can see it does support IPv6 -- https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005868927-UniFi-How-to-Implement-IPv6-with-DHCPv6-and-Prefix-Delegation-on-USG https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005868927-UniFi-H... is their own help article on the topic; it doesn't look difficult. It may even come standard in newer firmware. The one caveat I have with UBNT gear is that the stuff you get out of the box always seems to be outdated; I fought a friends ER-X for a few hours until I realised it was running old firmware that lacked some stuff I needed. That said, that might just be a quirk of living in New Zealand...
- Latty 9y agoYeah, I saw you can do it manually, but what's the point of paying for custom hardware with nice interfaces when you have to switch to a config file for really basic functionality? At that point, might as well stick with bodged consumer stuff.
- ad_hominem 9y agoYou'll also have to manually configure UPnP if you want to say, connect more than one Xbox One to Xbox Live at a time (learned that the hard way trying to host a LAN party - thank you broken/crippled EdgeRouter PoE UPnP implementation ruining my event). Besides the router issue, I've become very apprehensive at installing the latest UniFi AP firmware releases because I've experienced one revision absolutely tank WiFi performance (which took me a while to figure out the culprit thanks to the controller auto upgrading firmware) and another make APs periodically crash/bounce like every 20 mins. So yeah in my experience after using Ubiquiti products for a few years, they are way overhyped. I guess people are willing to overlook a lot if you have a nice sleek industrial design.
- mkl 9y agoThe APU2c4 has only 3 gigabit ethernet channels; do you mainly use it with wireless? Which wireless card? I also see you're in NZ. Did you get it from Nicegear?
- frio 9y agoYeah, the 3 ports is a limitation :(. One's wired up to the ONT (fibre terminal), one's wired up to another switch, and one's wired up to separate wifi endpoint (an old Mikrotik I had sitting around). I'd like to use a miniPCIe wireless card internally, but figured I can wait on that for a while. And yeah, I grabbed it from nicegear; they're good people :). They also sell AU/NZ power adapters that fit.
- cbzbc 9y agoOr you can get mini PC (Zotac or similar from AliExpress) and put any number of Linux distros on it for firewalling and optionally other stuff.