[Cerowrt-devel] edgerouter Xes and lede

[Joel Wirāmu Pauling]

I've been tempted by the c2600's just so I have a qca98xx 4x4 device to
play with. However i've seen a lot of negative reviews about them not
handling MIMO very well even in the vendor firmwares.

I am currently using ac1750's as my air interfaces and hanging them off
Ethernet over powerline or directly cabled via UTP and bringing all the
routing back to x86 based vm's for l3.

This is where having some sort of Radio Network controller would be really
useful rather than site scanning every couple of months and changing the
Channels on the air interfaces to suit.

-Joel

On 10 March 2017 at 10:34, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 1:21 PM, Joel Wirāmu Pauling <joel at aenertia.net>
> wrote:
> > I've just bought a couple of n3160 Braswell boards as was getting sick of
> > poor performance out of the MIP's stuff I have.
>
> I have been using the pcengines apu2 boards with good success prior to
> now (with ubuntu). I plan to switch one to lede when I get a chance.
>
> I don't recommend using them as a wifi AP, as you get better antennas
> out of anything else. Internally I've mostly switched to well-located
> ubnt uap-lites (running lede). They don't have any of the
> make-wifi-fast fixes as yet, but ac can be dramatically better than n.
> I also am mostly liking the tp-link AC2600 - a dual-core arm (on lede)
> - again, no make-wifi-fast fixes, but....
>
> I put the edgerouter x sfp in place today on my sonic fiber network.
> I'm not sure where the bottlenecks are, but I never get more than
> 130Mbits down per host I test from (so I suspect they are doing some
> interesting shaping there).
>
> I also got some kernel errors when running cake with it with (sigh)
> ethernet offloads enabled.
>
> > If you don't care about the AES-NI instruction set's you can pickup j1900
> > based 4 port routers off aliexpress for under $100 (with intel 200 series
> > NIC's no less).
> >
> > The n3160's you can get for around 100$ but the cheap one's only have 2
> gbit
> > ports (rtl's).
> >
> > The n3160's are only 6w at maximum draw and so far I've had much better
> > results out of them than any of the MIP's or ARM stuff i've been using
> for
> > the last few years.
> >
> > The UBN stuff has been recommended in the past but when you can shift
> the l3
> > forwarding to a much more featureful and standard x86_64 platform and
> just
> > hang your Wireless as dumb switches off of that I can't really think why
> > bothering with the esoteric stuff requiring ttl converters to get up and
> > running is going to warrant more investment at this point.
> >
> > No one has yet to produce a proper x86  AC router - you can kludge one
> > yourself with compex cards... I for one would totally buy one if such a
> > thing were available.
> >
> > On 10 March 2017 at 05:45, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> For a long time now I've had several edgerouters in production using
> >> their default (fq_codel-enabled) vyatta based OS. There are also
> >> backports of cake available for it.
> >>
> >> For 50-80 bucks, they are a *really nice quad core mips box* - capable
> >> of forwarding at a gbit (and for that matter, can serve netperf at a
> >> gbit)
> >>
> >> But dealing with their 3.10 ancient kernel and foreign configuration
> >> interface has always been a pain for me, so yesterday I reflashed my x
> >> and x-sfp with lede's final 17.01 release, and:
> >>
> >> they are *marvelous* as lede boxes. Oodles of flash. The quad core
> >> works well. I'm mad at myself for not reflashing them long ago...
> >>
> >> It's a PITA to reflash them - you have to open one up, put on a 3.3v
> >> ttl serial converter, tell uboot to load a fresh kernel via tftp, then
> >> copy a lede image over that and sysupgrade -n to rewrite the flash...
> >>
> >> but after you do all that, you never have to do it again.
> >>
> >> (I should probably write a howto)
> >>
> >> I haven't gone so far as to try deploying one - I'm still benchmarking
> >> - but as I've spent a lot of time trying to get little hackerboards to
> >> push a gbit (only the odroid c2 can) - and for that matter, I can't
> >> get the linksys ac1200 past 700Mbits - being able to do it on a box
> >> that comes with a case, that runs lede well, that has a bunch of ports
> >> on it - is a win.
> >>
> >> One thing that wasn't apparent to me from the marketing and my own
> >> usage, which presented 5 separate distinct ethX interfaces in the
> >> vyatta OS, is that, on lede, it has only a single ethernet interface
> >> onboard, and does it's magic for forwarding with vlan tagging (it may
> >> well be there are actual separate ethernet chips on it or the original
> >> binary firmware emulated those, but....)
> >>
> >> I tested SQM to 200Mbits, that worked fine.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Dave Täht
> >> Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
> >> http://blog.cerowrt.org
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Cerowrt-devel mailing list
> >> Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> >> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Dave Täht
> Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
> http://blog.cerowrt.org
>
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