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FreeBSD 10.0 on Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite
- zdw 13y agoSimilar, but not as mature support is being worked on in OpenBSD as well: http://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html http://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html
- gnoway 13y agoNote that UBNT claims line rate throughput and provides proof via a commissioned Tolly report (no idea on their legitimacy). The fbsd image yields ~250mbps between two gigabit hosts. I've been eyeing one of these for a while and putting fbsd on it interests me, but not if it means a huge peformance drop (even if I wouldn't really miss it).
- pktgen 13y agoUBNT's numbers are using the hardware fast path, which presumably is not supported by this project.
- profquail 13y agoAssuming UBNT is correct and the device supports line-rate throughput, I don't think there's any reason why FreeBSD couldn't easily support that. The freebsd-mips mailing list already has a few threads discussing this; if you want to know why the router isn't achieving line-rate speeds "out of the box", you'll probably get the best answer there (and maybe even someone who knows how to fix the problem): * http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-mips/2014-January/003263.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-mips/2014-January... * http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-mips/2014-February/thread.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-mips/2014-Februar... If you don't get a suitable answer there, you can also try freebsd-net: * http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/ http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/
- zx2c4 13y agoTo get any decent performance you have to use a horrible binary blob kernel module that offloads (certain very specific use cases) to hardware acceleration. See this post for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7282258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7282258
- jlgaddis 13y agoRelated: I picked up a couple of Neoware CA21 thin clients on eBay real cheap recently. 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM, and 1 GB disk-on-module. I built customized (NanoBSD) images and run them read-only off of a flash drive. I connected a Garmin GPS 18 LVC to one and have my own stratum 1 NTP server for < $100.
- zx2c4 13y agoUnfortunately, only one shitty Ethernet port. I'd love to find fast hardware with multiple independent gigabit ports for an affordable price.
- jlgaddis 13y agoRight, but they weren't designed to be fast routers. They make awesome single-purpose servers, though (DNS recursors and NTP, in my case).
- zx2c4 13y agoYea, for something like a single-purpose DNS recursor or NTP server, any cheap hardware will do. You got your terminal server for what? 15 dollars? Much more reasonable than the 100 bucks an ERL costs.
- js2 13y agoThat $100 is funding the ongoing development of EdgeOS though. It doesn't seem to make much sense to buy an ERL if you're just going to put another OS on it. Shrug.
- gnoway 13y agohttp://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm ? Presumably this will actually be released at some point soon. Also the soekris hardware looks nice, but it's pretty expensive.
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- blutack 13y agoAs an easier to obtain alternative to minicom, screen can also handle serial port communications quite happily for basic usecases (like this one). screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200 # Linux-centric example
- justincormack 13y agoThe downside of this right now is that there are no binary packages for mips64 and there is no space on the device to store a ports tree so you need to cross compile everything. I am running gentoo on mine at the minute, I did have FreeBSD on it for a bit. I tried a larger flash drive but the driver doesn't like it and won't mount the root partition, need to find one it likes. Or use nfs/smb but that is a pain.
- zx2c4 13y agoI successfully connected a USB hard drive to mine. If you're interested enough, email me and I'll go look up which inexpensive model of enclosure I'm using. The bootloader is indeed finicky but I guess I got lucky enough to have a HDD enclosure that just worked.
- justincormack 13y agoI must have some lying around, will give them a go. The bootloader works with my USB stick, but Linux doesn't like it. Will see if FreeBSD does or not.
- profquail 13y agoCould you store the ports tree on a network share, mount that share on the device, and compile that way? Seems like that would be easier than cross-compiling, if it'll work.
- justincormack 13y agoIn theory, though nfs and me/my network setup don't get on.
- zx2c4 13y agoI've been running Gentoo Linux on my EdgeRouter Lite for a long time now. <https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MIPS/ERLite-3> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MIPS/ERLite-3> I must say: the ERL is terrible hardware. You can get some performance out of it if you're using Ubiquiti's kernel, because it ships with a series of highly specialized proprietary modules that offload packet handling to hardware accelerated modules, for their custom proprietary network stack. But their kernel is old and shitty, and if you want to do anything interesting with the ERL, you have to build your own kernel. So for any mildly interesting usage, it fails considerably hard. And even if you do opt to use their closed-source binary blob kernel modules and software stack, as soon as you try to do any sort of advanced networking, you run up against the limits of their acceleration modules, and the OS is forced to fall back to standard non-accelerated mode, and performance drops. Try using PPP, any interesting iptables, MPTCP, OpenVPN, interesting routing tables, or anything cool: performance drops. I would be very happy to see some small networking hardware with multiple independent Ethernet controllers pop up on the market for a decent price; every other month or so my disappointment with the ERL moves me to re-research this. Unfortunately, the EdgeRouter Lite is not the hardware anybody wants for interesting low-cost networking.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- purple_horse 13y agoI also do not like Vyatta's weirdness. It looks like Linux, acts like Linux, but then you have to use all of the awful Vyatta commands to actually do anything.
- jauer 13y agoIf you are expecting a Linux distribution then yeah, it is weird. If you are expecting a network appliance then it's par for the course and you are grateful that you can drop to shell to do other things. JunOS is pretty much the same way.
- stephen_g 13y agoIt's not awful - just different. They specifically did it that way because people who configure large networks are much more used to this kind of interface (a la Cisco and Juniper hardware) and like this way a lot better. I'm hoping to really work on improving the documentation in the new Vyatta fork, VyOS, because poor documentation really let Vyatta down.
- rdl 13y agoIn general for small hardware I go with two options. Qualcomm-Atheros AR9331 based systems, with 64MB ram and 16MB flash (kind of hard to get in that config cheaply). You can get decent performance, potentially hang a 5.8/2.4ghz radio on it too, and power it off a single laptop USB port (200mA normal power use, and with stuff, still less than 500mA.) Can put second ethernet, wifi, 3G, etc. there. There's no current commercial hardware in this space which is perfect. That should change shortly. Much beefier systems with "real" amounts of RAM and flash. I generally skip the Broadcom/RPi/etc. and go straight to an Atom or i3, but that's just for convenience, since I only need a small number of them. There's probably something more reasonable to do in the embedded space, but I'm indifferent on qty 1 devices between $500 and $200, especially if I already have most of the components for the $500 thing lying around, and it saves me an hour or two getting it working. There are a lot of things missing from widely available commercial hardware in this space right now.
- weland 13y ago> Qualcomm-Atheros AR9331 based systems, with 64MB ram and 16MB flash (kind of hard to get in that config cheaply). The Carambola 2 board is pretty cheap and it's quite awesome.
- rdl 13y agoYeah; reworked TP-Link 703s are cheaper, though. Missing a couple of things I want, though.
- nodata 13y agoReworked how?
- rdl 13y agoSomeone who is less bad at surface mount soldering than I am can take a 702/703, pop the 2MB flash and 8-16M RAM chips off, and replace with 16/64. There are people in China who do this commercially, and some eBay stores. I've bricked (well, melted) 2 of them so far doing it myself.
- Fasebook 13y agoAnyone know anything about the base-band chip and it's OS?
- justincormack 13y agobase-band? There is no wireless.
- helper 13y agoNeat. I've been using an ERLite for the past ~6 months. It does its job, but I'm not super excited by it. I find the Vyatta interface to be a little annoying (most enterprise network gear I've worked with just copied Cisco's CLI exactly, Vyatta is just different enough to be surprising). I'm thinking about swapping it out for a Mirabox[1] I have laying around. Its an ARMv7 with dual Gigabit interfaces and 1GB of memory. With the 3.14 kernel the SoC is quite well supported. Now if only I could run pfSense on it. [1] https://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-58-mirabox-development-kit.aspx https://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-58-mirabox-develop...
- justincormack 13y agoDo you know if it can drive the interfaces at anything near gigabit? That seems to be a problem with a lot of ARM chipsets.
- stephen_g 13y agoVyatta's interface is modelled on Juniper's Junos, if I remember correctly.