A router for cybersecurity homelab

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
22

I hear you man. For normal people it's not an easy install.

The Protectli people highly recommended I install pfSense w a wireless wifi card bc the openwrt install is more difficult.
They replied to me just this morning less than an hour ago...
"We have an article here that gets used many times a day to install pfSense. It’s a step by step tutorial so pretty easy to follow: https://kb.protectli.com/kb/how-to-install-pfsense-ce-on-the-vault/

And here is one for OPNsense: https://kb.protectli.com/kb/how-to-install-opnsense-on-the-vault/

OpenWRT is a good option but it isn’t as feature rich as pfSense or OPNsense. We have a Knowledge Base article on installing that but it’s harder to install."

23

Install openwrt on a wifi dongle? Now you're the one trolling me.
Is that really possible?
I've had to WORSE luck getting past the Knox security on those dag nab Samsung devices.

24

Not what they said...

2 Likes
25

It is quite important to tell megabit from gigabyte
You need 8 megabytes aka 64 megabits storage to install very basic openwrt
And 64 Megabytes aka 512 Megabits to run that very basic thing
4x that is golden if you are to buy a new router.

26

This statement is obviously not true. I can tell you that I moved from pfSense to OpenWrt because some key features I want are only available on OpenWrt.

And installation, just a simple dd command, I don't think this is hard to install??

3 Likes
27

Depending on how much raw CPU power you need, the older Sophos x86-based devices can be quite a bargain if you're in US and some of them also come with the wireless card.

There's a list of known x86 Sophos devices here.

1 Like
28

I think you are confusing gigabytes with megabytes, and making a mess with the abbreviations (b means bit, and B beans byte).

1 Like
29

Thanks for the clarification. I was going to follow up on that n ask if he was able to get Luci to work on the Pi Zero but that would've been a dumb question. Thanks for the heads up. I think i'll just listen for awhile...

30

So I only need 8 or 16 MB of RAM to get Luci running?
Really?
Luci will work on a Pi 400 w only 4 GB of RAM?

31

Mini requirement for Openwrt is (soon) 128MB, not all for Luci of course, but for a usable device.

1GB is 1000x more than 1MB.

2 Likes
32

Did you really read my comment above? My 1st gen Pi with 512MB ram can do, yours is more than 10 times better and why do you think Pi 400 w/4GB ram doesn't work??

1 Like
33

I scrolled back up to look and yes I do see that you originally specified that your 1st-gen Pi 1B w/ 512MB ram can still run Luci. The first time i read that I wasn't sure if you were pulling my leg.
Thanks for making clear that is an actual possibility. I didn't really get that until just now.

34

Is that funny-looking list... parsed?
I found the Sophos SG-105w Rev3 from that parsed list on ebay for $90 and then found that model listed the Table of Hardware-ToH available.
It's a heckuva good lookin' box... but the price point of that MT6000 at $135 is TOO good.

35

They are different things, Sophos one is x86 (definitely has support, but slower than your Protectli), MT6000 has WiFi 6 built-in which is all-in-one.

36

@fakemanhk this one has a wifi card installed as well.

37

It has different variants, so there might not be WiFi.
Even with WiFi it's old.....and not simultaneously dual-band.

38

I have a device running OpenWRT 18.x, that has 4MB storage and 32MB RAM. LuCI works fine on it. I can't upgrade because 4MB is no longer enough. That's MB, not GB. You need to get a grasp on how limited in resources consumer routers are. Any Raspberry Pi or x86 device has always been a huge overkill in memory and storage for basic OpenWRT with LuCI.

p. s. You're here bothering people for basic things instead of RTFM, the least you can do is have some trust in them and not make them repeat themselves.

5 Likes