Re: Recommendations for small router?

[Jason Mitchell <jmitchel%bigjar.com@localhost>]

> On Nov 25, 2018, at 10:54 PM, Santhosh Raju <santhosh.raju%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 12:56 AM Lars-Johan Liman <liman%cafax.se@localhost> wrote:
>> 
>> [Sorry, sent a version of this from the wrong account a minute ago ...]
>> 
>> Hi!
>> 
>> Can anyone recommend a small piece of equipment for a home router that
>> supports the following:
>> 
>> *) Decently supported by and stable operation with NetBSD.
>> 
>> *) At least 4 GB RAM.
>> 
>> *) At least 2 GigE-ports (preferrably 3-4), and able to shuffle bits at
>>   line speed between the two.
>> 
>> *) Able to take a fairly large disk (possibly external) for medium speed
>>   storage. It doesn't have to blindingly fast (no video editing!), but
>>   I want to be able to have my home directory on it and use it from a
>>   different machine.
>> 
>> *) Not too noisy (fanless preferred but not required).
>> 
>> *) Graphics can be very basic, or it can have a serial interface.
>> 
>>                                Cheers,
>>                                  /Lars-Johan Liman
> 
> Have you had a look at https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm
> 
> More specifically https://pcengines.ch/apu4c4.htm The APU4C4 is quite
> nice in terms of specifications and it meets almost all of the
> requirements that you have mentioned. For storage you can use SD cards
> or even better mSATA drive.
> 
> The cost comes to ~120 USD with the board and enclosure (shipping cost
> not considered).
> 
> The only thing I have not tried out is NetBSD on the APU, however I
> have tried out other BSD flavors and they did work quite well.
> 
> I have come across some threads in the mailing list with slower than
> expected network transfer speeds in APU2 (but this was with NetBSD
> 7.0), I am not aware of the current status of NetBSD 8.0 on APU2.
> 
> Hope this reply has been helpful
> Regards
> Santhosh

Hello,

I have tested NetBSD on the first APU2 (with 3 Realtek Ethernet chips/re0) on i386.

One problem i did have is that NetBSD would lose its connection to the SD after idling for 12+ hours. This was with 6.1.5. So I used an mSSD.

As for speed the APU could do 580Mbit on iperf. This seemed pretty good (another device I have that has Realtek chips has done slightly worse with a better processor).

HTH,

Jason M.