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
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.
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 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.
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)!
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
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???
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!
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.
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!
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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 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?
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.
My best scenes whole thing in the UA-cam 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 🙏🏼
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".
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
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.
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
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
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
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.
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 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
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 UA-cam about that device
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!
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)
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
Here is why i prefer such a device to a netgear router : -open source software out of the box. No need to check router revision for openWRT/DDWRT/TOMATO support. -beefy CPU for a router, 1 to 8 GB of ram and whatever amount of flash you want; -if your router dies down the lane, you can just replace the hardware easily. All my routers died at some point, but you rarely can find the same router to swap it, or a feature equivalent or superior replacement that works on open source firmware; -you can do whatever you want with, install pihole or whatever (although some routers support a lot of stuff) -almost infinite software support (updates and bugfixes) from the OSS comunity There are many other reasons (you can make a cool case for it, you control the thermals, often poorly handled in routers, you can add a good power supply rather than the crappy ones provided with the commercial routers, add some battery for uninterupted power-well you can do that on a netgear or dlink too, to be honest... but here i can do it internally without voiding any warranty-, etc...)
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.
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
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.
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 :(
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.
Thank you for reporting energy consumption. This is really useful in RVs where running from battery power is a way of life.
Also off grid solar.
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
This device is PERFECT for a battery run home. Lol, buying mine in preparation for just that.
hahaha a 28 nm cuad a72 without crypto extension is the worst on energy efficiency fot a router...
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 :)
Take a look at Ivan's WIP for blade servers using the CM4 twitter.com/Merocle/status/1407684311344730117
@@Vatharian i hope that the Pi 5 CM will have the same connector like the CM 4 version, so you can keep your old "breakout boards"
@@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.
Oh thank Goodness. Somebody's making a Pi router. Time to buy!
I hope you got your order in. Looks like they've sold out for now.
@@andrewyoung8703 Nope, I didn't make it in time.
I would just use the standard Pi, much cheaper and more modular.
when this guy actually makes a product ready product is the day pigs fly. He's gunna stick to yt click bate
@@nigratruo : That depends on what you need/want out of said router. Like Jeff highlighted in the video...
PuTTY is no longer needed for SSH on Windows. OpenSSH is built in as of April 2018.
Yeah. Just use Powershell.
@@MrNeocortex There's even an OpenSSH *server* on windows 10 nowadays; so it's possible to ssh (&sftp) into windows directly.
Windows is no longer needed. Everything can be done on Linux as of May 2021
old habits die hard lol
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 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.
I've been using a p3b+ as a router for years. I don't have or need gigabyte speeds so it's worked perfectly for my needs.
As an 'old timer it dude, I thought I was done with this level of fun.. I like the way you help people understand the pros and cons of these boards.
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)!
Stil loving your bloopers at the end.. and your valueble insights on anything cm4 of course 👍
Thanks for this. I had forgotten about my Pi's for the last year and now impressed with how it's going. I'm back in the game. Kudos
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
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???
Can't wait to see the 2.5 gig show!
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!
I'm gonna yoink the dfrobot one before it runs out of stock. Thanks for sharing!
I'm hoping they can keep these in stock a while!
@@JeffGeerling Out of stock as of at least a couple hours ago.
Lol, nope. I ordered anyway, better get it within 2 months or I'll just cancel.
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! 👍
Meanwhile the avg internet speed in my town is like 1.5Mbps..
Chip supply. The SEED may be cheaper, but it's a USB hub, which sucks.
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.
I'd check out the NanoPi R4S 4GB if you're looking for a robust OpenWRT router for gigabit connections with SQM.
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!
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 :)
I didn't realize that but will have to check it out soon!
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.
Can't wait for the one with the 2.5g board. Love your stuff. You are the only UA-camr that I have all notifications on. keep up the great work.
Oh wow you're looking young in this video. I've seen almost all of your videos UpTo now, and saw this one which I haven't seen. You're the best.
I and my Pi 4 and a couple of USB-3 ethernet dongles under my desk were waiting for this video. Thank you for making it!
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.
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
Fantastic content. I happen to be in need of a mobile, small router for in field use. Your video just saved me a lot of time and headache.
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 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?
Looking forward to your 2.5 Gb version. Loved this video and the production quality. Thanks!
Great info and test results, thanks for all the work.. and I love the out-takes, they made my day.. Keep up all the great work!
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.
You are amazing. What a lot of work and so well done! I love the bloopers at the end. God bless you.
Still looking forward to the testing on the dual port 2.5gbps card you teased.
very impressive video, well thought out and edited ,you answered "EVERY" possible question I had .. "WELL DONE"
I currently have the DFRobot router board coming in the mail so i cant wait to play around with WRT again!
Have been looking to made a OoemWrt router using Pi since too long, this video covers it all!
My best scenes whole thing in the UA-cam 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 🙏🏼
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".
Great you include FLENT for network testing. It gives a great details over performance!
love all that tiny stuff I can tinker with myself... screw buying a "premade" router where is the fun in that?
This is the way.
For sure. I really like my pcengines apu4 board
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
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.
Will after the 2.5 Gb come the 10 Gb one and then the 10 GB + NAS / with 8 SATA interfaces?
Heh... 10 GbE is coming soon too; already have it working-though max throughput is sadly limited to 3.42 Gbps due to the Pi's PCIe x1 Gen 2 lane :(
@@JeffGeerling Would a pine Rockpro64 or any other RK3399 SMB such as khadas or SmartFly ones with Pcie x4 Gen 2.1 lanes be able to be faster?
that would be great !
@@JeffGeerling waiting for Pi 5 I guess ;)
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
Thanks! I'll take a look at that next time I do a build like this-I'm still pretty new to slicing and dicing in 3D printing :)
@@JeffGeerling How do you convert the step file the DFRobot supplies to files for the 3D printer?
@@dogsop I used Fusion 360 (Personal / non-commercial license) to select each of the case parts, and export them individually to STL files.
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.
Haha, I ran a similar machine with a Linux Router Project floppy disk in it, with a 56k modem hanging off it
@@SimonQuigley Got you beat on that, ours was 64K dedicated with 16 addresses. OUCH! About 600 a month. GLORY DAYS!!
@@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
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.
Great work as usual Jeff. I get to learn a lot even though I'm not planning to use a pi as a router. Thanks!
Use IRQBA... oh, good you did it already.
tested one device. This channel is annoying click bait for noobs.
things I didn't expect to see appearing the same shot: a hacksaw and a raspberry pi :)
Really appreciate the outtakes. Keeping it real.
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
Thanks. Great review of exactly the 2 boards I've been looking into!
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.
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 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
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 UA-cam about that device
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!
Note that OpenWRT's default config does do NAT and has a simple firewall (with about 8 rules) configured by default.
"I only got 700 MBit/s" Mean while in Germany... everyone cries when they got at least 16 MBit/s
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 $850/month + construction fees for 50/50 fiber.
@@rjhornsby wow 850$ for 50/50 Fibre is actually cheap. In Germany 😆
If there were any way I could get 50 Mbps upload, I'd gladly pay more than the $150/month I'm currently paying for my 20-30 up :)
@@JeffGeerling your paying 150$ 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)
dang. don't want your Raspberry Pi 4 Model B to be off center. Good thing you caught that!
There's a board called "NanoPi R2S" by FriendlyARM, which has 1 PCIE GbE NIC and 1 USB GbE NIC
Don't know if you check that thing already tho
Take a look at the Nano Pi R2s. Very interesting and cheap router sbc.
There is also the R4S which uses PCIe GbE, instead of USB3 Ethernet of R2S.
Best price I’ve seen is directly from the manufacturer in China. Shipping takes awhile though.
Love your videos! Please make videos around your drivers you make and low level programming stuff please! Thanks.
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.
Wow, what cool little router boards! Great video Jeff 👌
now we just need one with 3 or 4 ports... (I want a separate port for WLAN, and maybe another for untrusted devices...)
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?
Love the bloopers.
I mean, i love your content but the bloopers are too fun aswell. :)
Stay cool Jeff!!
So COOL!! thank you for these in depth reviews. I've been hoping for things that would replace my glinet mini router.
1:29 USB NICs are always unreliable in my experience. I would've liked to see both ports on the same controller though
Probably explains the slower speed.
Just seeing Red Shirt Jeff sawing a Pi 4B makes me sad
Waiting eagerly for the duel 2.5Gig networking video! Hats up Jeff. :)
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.
I'm stunned to see that routing performance given how many retail routers won't (really) route at that speed.
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!
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.
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.
You are simply great! Human race is benefited by you!
Network/Admin flashbacks... Great videos. Keep them coming :)
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!
Adguard is advised now on openwrt
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.
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.
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.
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!
+1 to that. Mikrotik products are awesome.
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.
I can confirm the USB Ethernet port lights work on the seeed board. 500-600 Mbit throughput still holds.
EYYY, our boi started using a skirt on his 3D prints. Im glad you were able to fix your issues.
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
Here is why i prefer such a device to a netgear router :
-open source software out of the box. No need to check router revision for openWRT/DDWRT/TOMATO support.
-beefy CPU for a router, 1 to 8 GB of ram and whatever amount of flash you want;
-if your router dies down the lane, you can just replace the hardware easily. All my routers died at some point, but you rarely can find the same router to swap it, or a feature equivalent or superior replacement that works on open source firmware;
-you can do whatever you want with, install pihole or whatever (although some routers support a lot of stuff)
-almost infinite software support (updates and bugfixes) from the OSS comunity
There are many other reasons (you can make a cool case for it, you control the thermals, often poorly handled in routers, you can add a good power supply rather than the crappy ones provided with the commercial routers, add some battery for uninterupted power-well you can do that on a netgear or dlink too, to be honest... but here i can do it internally without voiding any warranty-, etc...)
Recommendations working fine again
Jeff's UA-cam face game is tops.
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.
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
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 love the snark of Editor Jeff in the post comments.
Another amazing video Jeff. Thank you
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 :(
Another great video and the bloopers always make me laugh. Sterling work as always Jeff
If pfsense would work on a pi, i would think about using it, but without arm support, no.
Best thumbnail face yet. Doesn't even look like your face!
A Redshirt Jeff day is a good day
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.
You can. You just need to configure dhcp and tftp on the first one. www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/net_tutorial.md
I would like to see pi5 be able to have a external graphics card and faster four core processors. Might be eight core at 2.5 ghz
Rooting and retrofitting old smart phones is more fun than building rasberry pi gizmos. Psshaw.