Living in an RV, you say? If your home is truly mobile, would you mind telling me about your WiFi reception setup? I know that RV parks are infamous for poor WiFi, but by and large, it's really not entirely their fault.
@@pinaz993 Wifi is mostly useless, but a MOFI with a pair of 10DB omni antennas works great -- so far. a MOFI is a little linux box with cellular modem that provides a hardware router and wifi onboard, highly configurable. So not idiot proof like most products for the RV industry, but easy to use without reading the manual for someone like me who never reads the manual (but knows a lot about technology.) YMMV
Not at my computer atm so I can't easily check for myself.. But I'm running LTSC, which ends up being behind on some things. Do you know if it's in there?
I'm really liking where the pi ecosystem is headed with all these developments! Like, this kind of applications were always talked about but never truly feasible for every day use because of the interface limitations, now I finally really can consider using a pi as a router
If Raspberry Pi 5 includes pcie 3.0 or 4.0 or even 2.0, but with four lanes, that's going to be MUCH more interesting. I kind of imagine RPi 5 coming with single OCuLink sticking out of the board...
I usually only use raspberries for messing around and trying stuff. Even the old "standard" raspberries are pretty awesome for this. But imagining the possibilities, some of the new stuff opens up... Warms my heart, thinking of all the things I will probably fail at sometimes in the future :)
@@friedrich1277 If it will have different connectivity, like pcie x4 2.0 port, it will be bad. It all depends on its CPU, since they are targeting price point, not feature set. Other than that, just couple of days ago R Pi foundation confirmed they are working on RPi 4 A, but there is no work being done on RPi 5, neither prototyping nor design wise.
Love the bloopers at the end. Just shows a small amount of the struggle that goes into video production. Anyone that thumbs down does not know the struggle, time,& effort that goes into making a single video.
I was thinking the same thing. Jeff (and everyone else really) that makes a fantastic product, rarely does it in one go; it (apparently!!) takes HOURS to make a good presentation, particularly one with all the details that Jeff puts in his. Pretty amazing, Jeff - fantastic job. Thank you for sharing.
I feel like the price would be a big no-no for me when things like the Edgerouter X for unter 50 bucks exist if you just need a good router and don't utilize the hdmi port, the usb ports or the GPIO pins.
it's a neat little gadget, but the ubiquiti edgerouter ER-X is $60 last time i checked. alternatively, you can buy an older thin client PC and stick a quad 1G NIC or dual 2.5G NIC into it for under $90. so, this is really not worth it. but that's just my opinion.
Also of interest is the nano pi r2s dual-homed router. It works well at 1 Gbps on both ports. It's capable of 2.5 Gbps but under armbian the present driver is unstable. I've run an R2S for quite a while now and using the excellent heatsink case I've never had any issues. It just works well
Thanks! What's old is new, and all that jazz-I see a lot of people getting back into the 'build your own' game these days, probably as a knee-jerk reaction to how much modern computing platforms are getting locked down. The big difference is unlike 20-40 years ago, you can get the equivalent of like 500 back-then cray supercomputers at your disposal. Makes things a lot more fun (IMO)!
If all you need are two Gigabyte ports, the NanoPi R4S is a powerful router that runs OpenWRT and can manage a 1 Gigabit WAN uplink with SQM. Search for tests done on reddit, it smokes the RPi.
for a year now, I've been running a Pi4B as openwrt router with VLANS uplinked with a single Gbit cable to a Layer 2 managed switch. One port on the switch goes to a 500/500 Fibre optic media converter. It works absolutely fabulously, no hiccups, lightning fast DNS (unbound) and full 500/500 speed despite SPI. It has completely replaced the standard router(zyxel) supplied by the carrier. The line between LAN and Internet has faded nearly completely.
5:53 "or if you're using PuTTy on Windows" Whilst using PuTTy is perfectly valid, Windows now natively supports SSH in the command prompt. You might have to enable it in the system settings but it's there :)
This reminds me of the 25 year old LPR - Linux Router Project. To build your own router then, you took an older computer, and added two or more 10/100 Ethernet cards. Gigabit ethernet was new and expensive, and only really viable for cheap projects like this after the year 2000. You would set one config file on a floppy and boot the entire computer with only one 1.4MB 3.5" floppy drive. That was both OS and config. Bigger than the Pi for sure, but at time it was revolutionarily cheap. Routers of the day were hundreds of dollars and specialty equipment.
Yeah, I remember thinking Gigabit was exotic when I was still installing 10baseT and fancy 10/100 cards in some servers back in the day. 1 Gbps is so common and cheap now... makes you forget how slow a congested old network was-floppy-disk-like speeds over the network were common!
Great video as always! I was seriously considering getting the DFRobot to try / play around with till I saw they jacked up the price by 50%. I mean, $45 for the SEED seems reasonable since it also has the additional capabilities of potentially doing double duty as a NAS as pointed out in the video - so not sure how DFRobot can justify jacking up the price. I know Jeff pointed out the slower throughputs on SEED but that should not be an issue for folks with say 500Mbps or lower speeds. Anyway, keep up the great work, Jeff! 👍
It has crappy 1Gbe downlink to your switch. What NAS are you talking about? That's a nonsense. Imagine you ul/dl something to/from NAS and that will shut down your internet completely. Silly idea.
HOLEY UNDERWEAR, this immediately brought to mind the old 486 4meg headless floppy equipped, keyboardless machine with 2 interfaces running one of my favourite solutions FLOPPYFW (1.6meg) at my chilean cyber cafe up to 2003. Not a router... but a good way to make use of 'obsolete' hardware. No harddisk, no pool, no pets. It aint got no cigarettes.
@@loginregional lol, I "upgraded" to a Windows 95 machine with a NetJet ISDN interface card for 56 or 112k digital connection, using Sygate(? actually, I think it was WinGate) for NAT.. Horrible memories.
@@SimonQuigley RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! Worst. Software. Ever. I used it for a very short time for a smaller cybercafe in 97 that used dialup. There was a solution in SuSE at the time... but my bwain is ti...r...ed. Best command learned at the time: dd. Made doing images S.I.M.P.L.E
It's humble of you to show bloopers at the end, without which we'd be convinced you were flawless! This also shows the diligent work you put in to produce a flawless end production, as easy as you make it look.
bruh until now i was just reading your books and appreciating how you explain everything so well and only now i found out you have a youtube channel???
I just ordered a CM4 with Wireless, 4GB ram, and 32GB eMMC and the DFRobot bundle - cant wait to make this my primary router for the fibre coming into the house
RTK 8111-H support MSI and MSI-X, meaning that it doesn't use IRQ that much. NAPI infrastructure with MSI uses interrupt mitigation, disabling interrupts when there's high load, working in a somewhat synchronous mode. What 8111 lacks (I think) is a multiple queues infrastructure that server NICs have, that could boost performances even more sharing interrupts between multiple cores instead of always hitting the same core.
I believe you can get really good value switches or routers but, having a RPI like this to play with OpenWRT is heaven on earth Low power consumption, ability to use part of the router in other projects (I'm talking about the CM4 board) and the software supports that will keep on growing over time is very nice! Also, did you have a look at Banana PI R2?
There's a lot of talk nowadays about going green and energy consumption. Devices like the Pi that is so versatile and use such small amount of energy is a bonus for me.
I love the idea, I dislike the headache that caused twice (on successes, excluding failures) when I built my own out of a pile of desktop parts. Worked well when it did, but broke like a house of cards any time you had to touch it. Great if I can set up a separate tinker lab and it isn't my own home LAN at stake. Definitely more fun that way and I get to learn stuff.
@@JeffGeerling make a for real production ready product for people. This is half ass work and annoying. All your videos are just look it works on a pi then you move onto the next half ass video. Put real effort and perfection into these. literally anyone that is can sit and ask questions at google for 30min could make these videos. please put in more effort and thought
Man this is all foreign language to me, but I love it, LOL! This things are getting better and better with the performance and technology out of the box!! I'm learning so much from your videos, thank you for your dedication and passion to the community!
Tip about 0 tolerance stls: You can use the Horizontal Expansion setting in Cura (or equivalent in anything else) to make it smaller in the axis that are usually the problem (X, Y). Bonus tip: You can use Initial Layer Horizontal Expansion to get rid of elephants foot
64 byte packets are almost pathologically small. They are legal, of course, and it is a good test to do, but I'd also always do a test with maybe 512 bytes. The reason is that there's always a packets-per-second limit (due to IRQ or similar I/O limitations). Also, because the internal data structures used to store packets in memory are likely to be larger than 64 bytes, the system may actually be transferring more data per packet already. So either way there's a good chance that you can get a higher average bitrate by using bigger packets, because it gets more data through "for free".
hey man great video, As a long-time networking nerd still gnawing at the idea of finishing my CCIE, one thought was to perform UDP based iperf to get TCP windowing and retransmissions out of the way.
I use edgerouter most of the time, but the normal pi4 is awesome for router duty. I've been using mine as a backup router on my home network, when my DSL dies. Either through its wifi and my phone in hotspot duty, or through a 3g usb modem. Openwrt works like a charm with minimal fiddling
I wish dual nics were more common ie on larger (workstation) laptops, on the pi etc. I'd love to see a firewall like Untangle /pfsense running well on a 12v tiny router. The masses need a decent plug and play solution.
Ive got a Pi4 setup as a router (OpenWRT) using its single gigabit port - setup with VLAN through a managed switch for connection to WAN and LAN. Speeds hang out at 930s Up and 840s Down on ATT Fiber.
Great vid as usual! I would be curious comparing these offerings to the single board mikrotik solutions. Some mikrotik router boards are about $50 and are similar. More red shirt Jeff!
With an 802.1q-compatible managed switch, you could just use the pi as a router with its single gigabit port via the "router-on-a-stick" method. You'd just route traffic from one vlan (used for your wan connection) to another (used for your lan). The pi would be attached to the switch via a "trunk" port belonging to both the wan and lan vlans, and then just route traffic to and fro. I'm not sure how the performance would compare to the methods described in the video but people have done it and say it works well. I think this is how many consumer routers work internally anyway.
Jeff, I don't recommend using any Intel wifi cards for a router. They only allow creating access point on 2.4GHz. For whatever reason, 5GHz APs are prohibited on ALL intel wifi cards.
My best scenes whole thing in the RU-vid Mr Jeff is the end of this video, Mr Jeff has repeated taking a scenes 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼 All your video is good and it is inspired amflearning by doing Thanks alot Mr Jeff 🙏🏼
If anyone's looking for a minimal linux based OpenWRT gigabit router, consider the NanoPi R4S using FriendlyWRT (based on OpenWRT). It uses an RK3399 so it's not quite the same as these PI based routers but it has great performance and you can get it with a passively cooled metal enclosure. It's great.
I just found that video... I have bought the Seeed model in june, and I the speeds are a lot better than what you get here! It saturates the gigabit connexion no problem... My speed tests are getting me around 940Mbps up and down with the firewall active. I used a stock OpenWRT image as I did not want to use the one provided directly by Seeed... because reasons! I might add that I had speed issues when using a PSU that was not powerfull enough. The one that works is a 4amp 5V PSU
Awesome review and thanks for sharing. Regards from someone who built (cross-compiled) tiny Gentoo systems for Soekris hardware back in the days for multi-wan routers.
The real value of something like this is as an IPFire or PFSense host or a MitM for Wireshark, thus why the DFRobot's case design gives the CPU so much open air access. I'd start with IPFire since it is proper FOSSy, but it needs some porting work done to run on the Pi4.
Happen to catch his upload speed? I think it was somewhere around 20-25Mb/s. Don’t know what it’s like elsewhere, but that’s one of the stupid, infuriating games residential ISPs - especially cable - often play here in the U.S. They way over provision the lines so you’re fighting with your neighbors over shared bandwidth, and sacrifice all upload speed to market “super fast not-at-all-a-monopoly (download) internet speed”. Then pretend to be stupid and act like upstream is wha? Often with cable, my case included (“business” account), I can now buy “1Gb/s (down)” - but 30 up, just 3%, is max. Unless I want to pay starting at $850/month + construction fees for 50/50 fiber.
@@JeffGeerling your paying 150$ for an 1000/30 cable connection? well ill never cry about the prices here :D - 1000/50 cable connection in germany is like 50€ / around 60$ oO - only DSL / Fibre Connection is getting kinda expensive
Same here with the slow upload I have 1gbit down and 50 up with vodafone cable 50€ in germany ;) (But i live in berlin and it makes me sad seeing that even in the capital you dont have real access to fibre)
Your best bet is probably a MikroTik device. Too much extra would tax the Pi without a lot of all extra ASIC installed. A hAP ac3 or a RB2011 w/ wireless would probably suit your needs best, without knowing more about your use case.
So … I do have to ask, what use is a two port router? If you are connecting two machines, why not just use a flip cable, and you get complete throughout, and if you are connecting a machine to a router just use a longer cable?
I'm guessing the purpose is to have the pi router handle the bridge from WAN to LAN, then connect the pi to a network switch with however many ports you need. I'd be curious how many ports the pi could support. Would we see major throttling when routing for 8, 16, 32+ ports?
First, thanks for the awesome videos! You always have such great content! On your initial statement on what a router is... technically a router just routes between two networks. Whether it's internal or external doesn't matter. A consumer grade "router" also does Network Address Translation between your internal IPs and an external IP. They also sometimes have firewalling features. It's much easier to route than nat/firewall from a computational perspective. Does it matter in the real world on a pi? No idea!
Unfortunately, a lot of retail routers use pretty terrible chips (performance-wise), whereas the Pi 4 isn't a powerhouse, but it's not a slouch either!
I've been looking to use a pi zero w as a wireless router out and about to connect multiple wireless clients to each other for LAN connections. This is a perfect project for inspiration and further research, thanks. Edit: I don't need high bandwidth or anything intense, it would mostly be used for Nintendo switch gaming TCP packets that don't care about data integrity and are not overly large.
The difference in throughput for the two router boards likely matters to people who have gigabit (or faster) internet connections, but some of us have internet connections that are limited to a small fraction of that speed. My own connection, which uses a cable modem, is set to 100 megabit speed which for my purposes generally feels quite zippy and has never felt less than completely adequate. I suspect that most of the small, perceptible delay I see in things arriving here comes from various limitations and latencies on the servers and services I am accessing. Considering the higher cost of a faster connection and my lack of any need for more speed than I am currently getting, I will likely stick with this for the foreseeable future. Viewed in the context of my use case the difference between the performance levels of the two boards is of no consequence whatsoever which means that the other differences between the two boards dominate my evaluation of the two. Fortunately, Jeff has kindly spent time discussing all those other differences as well. Thank you, Jeff.
You're quite welcome! And I'd be perfectly happy with 100 Mbps down, if I could get 50 or 100 Mbps up. Unfortunately the only way I can get 30 Mbps up is to pay for the way overpowered "gigabit" plan :(
Hi, have you seen the Nanopi r2s? If so, have you done test on it? I'm planning to buy one as my next router so I've been doing a little research on the side but there's only a few video on RU-vid about that device
Jeff, my long time dream was to use Pi's a router, back then, when I investigated the question, there were no 2x NIC cards available. Thank you so much for this video and looking forward very much for your new option with PCI-e card and CM4. Cheers from Russia. BTW VPN throughput is VERY important characteristic for the router... testing just NIC bandwidth is somewhat disconnected from reality a bit.
Just use a regular Pi4, run the inside and outside networks of different VLANs. As long as your switch can handle a trunk, you're good to go. That's not even cutting corners, we do it in our data centers all the time.
I bought a second-hand linksys acs1900wrt which can have both openwrt and ddwrt installed at the same time. (was nice to try both, I prefer openwrt). I always appreciate what you try with the raspberry pis but my conclusion is often to not try using a raspberry pi for the use case and get better hardware instead
Love your videos, Jeff. They are succinct and informative and pleasant. Really need to get into the raspi ecosystem after I got burned on edison a few years ago
Man it would be nice if someone produced a proper networking board for the CM4. Like 4 GBps interfaces, with direct PCIe interfaces, and some serious WiFi abilities. Then you'd have a heck of a platform to start thinking about an open source professional level appliance. Would also be cool if it was capable of pushing PoE.
I hope the Zeros are getting RPI 4 updates soon. I don't have a need for a RPI router, at least not until it can fully replace an off the shelf router, 1 upstream port, 4 downstream ports, and decent wireless capabilities are a baseline standard for non-mesh setups, MoCA capabilities are also a nice addon; but a RPI will never have the expandability for this, some other SBCs however might reach into the territory of being capable of it. But having an updated Zero, hopefully functioning off of Type C mode switching for passive ethernet dongle purposes, could work well as a PiHole unit. Similarly, a Zero, while tapping the PCIe functionality of RPI 4, with a much, much better wireless chip, could be the basis for a decent mesh network setup; alternatively, swap WiFi for a different wireless standard and have smarthome integration based off RPI, IIRC someone was working on Z-Wave integration for RPI and getting an RPI-based product Z-Wave certified.
Sure would be nice to have a 3rd port (via pci-e) with a GigE 8port switch chip and connectors on it. This would allow for 1 port for Internet, 1 port for DMZ, and 8 ports for the home lan.
What I would love to see with Pi boards like this would be built in network booting such that after setting up the first board as usual, and then connect a second board to that first one via USB or Ethernet or something, but no SD card, and the second board gets its boot image from that first board via TFTP or something like that, and then just be able to build a chain of Pi boards like that. That would be a lot of fun to play with.
If the DFRobot could also support something like Pi-Hole, we'd have a tiny Gigabit router that has adblocking built-in, giving us an extra Pi for other projects. I haven't played with OpenWRT in years, so who knows, it may already be there!
The Seeed unit is a great little edge device and isn't unobtanium these days and now runs Ubuntu out of the box or ever a RHEL clone if you want to monkey around with or rely on open UEFI. The power sipping of the robot board is interesting, tho, I need to take a look at them and hopefully there are now reasonable cases available for them. If you want dirt cheap, low power, adequate performance, and easy config, Mikrotik still holds the crown and some of them can be hacked to run OpenWRT.
amazing..if you have the time, would you please also show or guide us on how best to use tailscale/taildrop on pi clusters or even virtual clusters locally and remotely. ur way of explaining is easy even on these geeky home lab configs.
