News Open-source OpenWrt One router released at $89 — 'hacker-friendly device' sports two Ethernet ports, three USB ports, with dual-band Wi-Fi 6

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We said WiFi 6E (drinks Ghost faze heavily.) Or just 7. Ah! I just found this on AliExpress:
$83.57 | BPI-R4-NIC-BE14 WiFi 7 Module with MediaTek MT7995AV Optional Antennas 32-bit RISC-V MCU 2 PCIe 3.0 Interface for Banana Pi R4
https://a.aliexpress.com/_mLTa8Q7
 
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as soon as I saw "Mediatek" in the description, I thought, uh-oh..

maybe they've changed but I have low expections of Mediatek releasing source code for drivers and things, as historically they were poor for this, even when they had a legal obligation to do so under the GPL.
 
It is strange they do not use wifi6e since wifi6 doesn't really give much over wifi5. The newer chips cost almost exactly the same when you look the bulk prices up.

I don't really see the need for third party firmware anymore...other than when you don't trust the manufacture to provide updates.

Pretty much even very cheap routers now have all the key features people used to use third party firmware to get. Many have even VPN and NAS support.

Things like advanced firewall support are almost completely useless because of encryption. The very advanced firewall methods are also well beyond the cpu power of these tiny router cpu.

Other things like support of router protocols like OSPF....who is really going to use that. More of a toy to play with since you need large numbers of routers to need be running a routing protocol inside your house.

The really fun features that I would want to play with are locked up in drivers that you load into the wifi chips. I remember my disappointment when I wanted to add a simple counter that showed how many wifi frames had errors. No way to get that information out of the wifi chips.
 
speculatrix said:
as soon as I saw "Mediatek" in the description, I thought, uh-oh..

maybe they've changed but I have low expections of Mediatek releasing source code for drivers and things, as historically they were poor for this, even when they had a legal obligation to do so under the GPL.
Click to expand...

I don't see any better option though. The only up-to-date players nowadays are just Mediatek and Qualcomm.

Qualcomm is a pain in the ass to get its NSS working for NAT/netfilter offloading, while mediatek has very good support since about the EdgeRouter X days.

Mediatek provides update via an easily accessible repo, with lots of their hardware-specific fix: https://git01.mediatek.com/plugins/gitiles/openwrt/feeds/mtk-openwrt-feeds/

But good luck finding the equivalent for Qualcomm. From what i know, most Qualcomm supports come from either leaked (and outdated) QSDK or reverse engineering.
 
feiyax said:
Judged from the SoC's datasheet, https://one.openwrt.org/hardware/MT7981B_Wi-Fi6_Platform_Datasheet_Open_V1.0.pdf

The chip has just one gigabit and one 2.5G interfaces
Click to expand...
yep, which it too bad... for that. i wouldnt touch this... while my connection is only a gigiabit down, the router i have, has a 2.5g wan, and, while it does have 4 gigabit ports, it also has a 10 G port, which most of my network is connected to via the 10g switch i also picked up, so as the network here improves, i will still be able to adjust over to the 10G side if need be, the only things i have that are still gigabit, are the tvs, and a couple of computers... .
 
This is why I've long sense just built my own routers and NAS devices. Device manufacturers would rather sell you a new device then let you upgrade a previous one.

It's not hard to build your own system from parts, install linux and then install the various software to do the rest.
 
Ogotai said:
yep, which it too bad... for that. i wouldnt touch this... while my connection is only a gigiabit down, the router i have, has a 2.5g wan, and, while it does have 4 gigabit ports, it also has a 10 G port, which most of my network is connected to via the 10g switch i also picked up, so as the network here improves, i will still be able to adjust over to the 10G side if need be, the only things i have that are still gigabit, are the tvs, and a couple of computers... .
Click to expand...
There is a misunderstanding how these work.

Your existing device has multiple chips, all those extra ports are provided via a switch ASIC that is hard wired into the router SOC. This model opted to skip that and leave the switching to an external device.
 
palladin9479 said:
It's not hard to build your own system from parts, install linux and then install the various software to do the rest.
Click to expand...
it is if you dont know how to build your own systems, or dont know linux...
palladin9479 said:
There is a misunderstanding how these work.

Your existing device has multiple chips, all those extra ports are provided via a switch ASIC that is hard wired into the router SOC. This model opted to skip that and leave the switching to an external device.
Click to expand...
which is fine, but limiting the other port to gigabit, limits the usefullness of this in the long run..
 
Ogotai said:
it is if you dont know how to build your own systems, or dont know linux...

which is fine, but limiting the other port to gigabit, limits the usefullness of this in the long run..
Click to expand...

Nobody was born with basic linux / unix knowledge, it's something you learn through practice and doing home projects like this one.

They are not limiting ports, the router SOC chip comes with two external ports, one at 1Gbe the other at 2.5Gbe. What someone like DLink or Linksys (Cisco) would do is then put a 5 port switched ASIC on board and wire the SOC's 2.5 Gbe port to one port on the switch ASIC. This would give the device one 1Gbe port and four 2.5 Gbe ports.

What OpenWRT did instead was to leave the choice up to the buyer. There are just two external ports, 1Gbe and 2.5Gbe, you chose what to do with them.

And to better understand, none of these products are "routers". Nobody in here is building VLAN's with a OSPF configuration, doing eBGP or route redistribution. Because you have just as single VLAN (192.168.1.1/24) and are only handling traffic to and from a NATed interface to a local interface, there is zero need for any sort of routing protocol. It's just a simple, if not local then go here, logic. The term for these devices is network Gateways. The manufacturers just add basic Stateful Packet Inspection and Network Address Translation to them via software. Then they bolted on basic Wireless Access Point functionality.

Quagga is a good OSPF / BGP routing protocol implementation for linux. Not needed

Quagga Software Routing Suite

Quagga Routing Suite homepage. Main site for the Quagga Routing Suite software. CVS access, snapshots, binary builds and a Bugzilla bug reporting site. Quagga is a fork of GNU Zebra.
www.nongnu.org

Shoreline firewall is a really simple and easy to wrapper for iptables, which is the core linux firewall. Define the interfaces, zones, policies and rulesets and it will build your iptables configuration for you.

https://shorewall.org

Anyhow, understanding what OpenWRT is doing is vital to understanding why they made the choices they did. They aren't trying to give you an Apple-esque one touch "network stack in a box" and instead are just providing a basic network Gateway that you can build the rest of your home network around without worrying about any malicious segmentation from the manufacturer.
 
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palladin9479 said:
Nobody was born with basic linux / unix knowledge, it's something you learn through practice and doing home projects like this one.
Click to expand...
yea, i doubt many would go through the trouble to do that. and just buy an out of the box solution.
palladin9479 said:
What someone like DLink or Linksys (Cisco) would do is then put a 5 port switched ASIC on board and wire the SOC's 2.5 Gbe port to one port on the switch ASIC. This would give the device one 1Gbe port and four 2.5 Gbe ports.
Click to expand...
but wouldnt that just split the bandwidth of the 2.5g port over 4 ports ? there for not really 4 x 2.5g ports?
palladin9479 said:
What OpenWRT did instead was to leave the choice up to the buyer. There are just two external ports, 1Gbe and 2.5Gbe, you chose what to do with them
Click to expand...
so the 2.5g can be lan, or wan, just as the 1g can be as well ? if so, thats not bad, but still limiting the band with either way if some one has better then 1 gig service... i have 4 people where i am, and i doubt the 4 of us have been able to max out the 1 gig D/L speed...
 
Ogotai said:
yea, i doubt many would go through the trouble to do that. and just buy an out of the box solution.

but wouldnt that just split the bandwidth of the 2.5g port over 4 ports ? there for not really 4 x 2.5g ports?

so the 2.5g can be lan, or wan, just as the 1g can be as well ? if so, thats not bad, but still limiting the band with either way if some one has better then 1 gig service... i have 4 people where i am, and i doubt the 4 of us have been able to max out the 1 gig D/L speed...
Click to expand...

That is not how networking works .. not ... remotely.

All switches have something called backplane speed, which is the total bandwidth or packets the switch can process. Since your not likely to go anywhere near the packet limit on such a simple layer 2 device, it's the total bandwidth that is important. That bandwidth is usually measured in tens to hundreds of Gb/s. One 1Gbe port has a theoretical max bandwidth of 2Gb/s, a four port ethernet switch would only have to handle 8Gb/s backplane, which is easily done on anything made in the past couple of decades.

So a switch does not "divide bandwidth across all ports", it just routes layer 2 packets from source to destination. If device A is on port 1 and needs to send to device C on port 3, the switch to relay that packet from port 1 to port 3, ports 2 and 4 never see anything. If device A, B and C all need to send to device D, the switch will order and relay all three streams of packets down port 4 where Device D is plugged in.

If you have a 1Gb/s internet connection then your maximum download speed, regardless of number of devices, is 125MB's. Most gateways operate under a First In First Out (FIFO) queuing system, so unless you have setup Quality of Service (QoS), then all packets are going to be handled in the order they are received in.

There is nothing special about "the internet" port, it's just an ethernet port. My virtual router I made has four virtual ethernet ports each at 10Gbe (VMXNET3). One of those ports is on a virtual switch that has port 1 of my dual port 10GbE adapter connected to it, and that port goes to my local 10GbE switch. Another port on that virtual router goes to a another virtual switch that has the second physical port that has my FIOS ONT 1GbE connected. The other two virtual ports are connected to LAB and DMZ virtual switches that I do my projects on and never touch anything physical. When I configure my router (as in real router) I can define which port is "WAN". Now in a web gui that is what it'll show up as, while in reality it's just a set of NAT MASQ rules saying which network port to masquerade the local traffic through.


Code: 
#
# Shorewall version 4 - Masq file
#
# For information about entries in this file, type "man shorewall-masq"
#
# The manpage is also online at
# [url=http://www.shorewall.net/manpages/shorewall-masq.html]http://www.shorewall.net/manpages/shorewall-masq.html[/url]
#
###############################################################################
#INTERFACE              SOURCE          ADDRESS         PROTO   PORT(S) IPSEC   MARK
eth0    192.168.51.0/24
eth0    192.168.61.0/24
eth0    192.168.71.0/24
eth0    10.51.1.0/24
eth0    10.51.2.0/24
eth0    10.51.3.0/24
eth0    10.51.4.0/24
tun4    192.168.51.0/24
#LAST LINE -- ADD YOUR ENTRIES ABOVE THIS LINE -- DO NOT REMOVE

Then you just make sure your routing table has your ISP's gateway in it, which should happen automatically with DHCP and assuming you didn't try to manually add a 0.0.0.0 route to it (that's default gateway).

Code: 
[root@vegarouter7 shorewall]# route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
0.0.0.0         70.80.100.1    0.0.0.0         UG    100    0        0 eth0
10.51.1.0       192.168.51.16   255.255.255.0   UG    20     0        0 eth1
10.51.2.0       192.168.51.16   255.255.255.0   UG    20     0        0 eth1
10.51.3.0       192.168.51.16   255.255.255.0   UG    20     0        0 eth1
10.51.4.0       192.168.51.16   255.255.255.0   UG    20     0        0 eth1
70.80.100.0    0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     100    0        0 eth0
192.168.51.0    0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     101    0        0 eth1
192.168.71.0    0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     102    0        0 eth2

Now any traffic that reaches it from those subnets that needs to go out will be routed out the default route, which eth0 and gets masq'd on it's way out.

That OpenWRT device is for hobbyists that want to build their own stuff. It's fairly cheap and provides you with a network gateway.
 
hmmmm thats still above my pay grade for the most part.. but does make sense...

either way, this openwrt device.. probably isnt something i would even be looking at, as to use it, and external switches other then, plug in, setup using the routers gui, would be something i wouldn't be able to do... :)
 
I fail to see what point a single 2.5gb port would have on a router. The effective bandwidth would always be limited by the 1gb port on the other end. Seems like a compromise of off the shelf parts rather than a well thought out product with a purpose.
 
If this had shown up years back when 1Gig connections a dream, then maybe, now, its out of date before its of the assembly line. I'll stick to my Dell OPNsense machine (£85), for very little more than adding dual 2.5G nic (£16).
 
qwertymac93 said:
I fail to see what point a single 2.5gb port would have on a router. The effective bandwidth would always be limited by the 1gb port on the other end. Seems like a compromise of off the shelf parts rather than a well thought out product with a purpose.
Click to expand...

It's what the Mediatek SOC came with. As I explained above, OpenWRT left the local switching up to the user instead of hard wiring a switching ASIC. You can use the 1Gbe for internet and the 2.5 Gbe for local, allowing the Wifi 6 and LAN to both communicate at high speeds. Or use the 2.5 Gbe for the internet and have the 1Gbe for the LAN, assuming people are heavily using both for streaming.
 
palladin9479 said:
It's what the Mediatek SOC came with. As I explained above, OpenWRT left the local switching up to the user instead of hard wiring a switching ASIC. You can use the 1Gbe for internet and the 2.5 Gbe for local, allowing the Wifi 6 and LAN to both communicate at high speeds. Or use the 2.5 Gbe for the internet and have the 1Gbe for the LAN, assuming people are heavily using both for streaming.
Click to expand...
I see there is some benefit to having even one 2.5gbps port when both wired and wireless LAN are under heavy load at the same time and a higher speed WAN is available. Thanks. I'm so used to having routers be separate devices from WAPs I didn't register this.
 
Ogotai said:
either way, this openwrt device.. probably isnt something i would even be looking at, as to use it, and external switches other then, plug in, setup using the routers gui, would be something i wouldn't be able to do... :)
Click to expand...

yes, palladin9479's post was very intimidating! but, why do you insist on asserting your original opinion afterwards? I think we've established that you don't have a whole lot to contribute to the discussion, so erm, cough, with all due respect, why should any of us care that you don't have the skills to purchase this? When you determine it's "above your pay grade," then you quietly leave the discussion, not add "WELL I WON'T BUY IT, SO THERE! WHAAAAH!"​

 
It's interesting that while this OpenWRT One is sold out in their store and the original Aliexpress stores, also on Ali express, Banana Pi is selling even cheaper Wifi6 Routers with Triductor TR6560 + TR5220 wifi SOC, four ethernet ports (1GB?) for as little as $36.04 Did Banana Pi just totally undercut the "official" OpenWRT router with proprietary versions?
 
cuvtixo said:
why do you insist on asserting your original opinion afterwards?
Click to expand...
why ? cause its called a discussion.
cuvtixo said:
I think we've established that you don't have a whole lot to contribute to the discussion
Click to expand...
and you do ? sure doesnt seem like it..
cuvtixo said:
why should any of us care that you don't have the skills to purchase this
Click to expand...
no need to be rude, or insulting. and you have no idea what my skill set could be based on a few posts...
cuvtixo said:
When you determine it's "above your pay grade," then you quietly leave the discussion
Click to expand...
as for this.. post #16 is what i was referring to.. as i would have no idea how to of done that.. but, now.. it i want to try it, i have an idea how to...

cuvtixo said:
then you quietly leave the discussion
Click to expand...
you 1st... your post to me, was nothing but insulting and rude. period
 
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