Hello all,
I'm new here, so nice to meet you all in advance. Here's where I'm at in all this. I am an older gamer that is trying to take care of the bufferbloat problem to my Xbox One and keep the rest of the family happy. I made the mistake of thinking gigabit service would help and things seem to be worse for the gaming. The are five people living here, all with laptops and smartphones. There are five Roku's and one smart TV and also two normal PC's....sometimes more, depending on what I'm up to.
I have an ASUS RT-AC87U router which is in the hardware section on your site but not fully supported from what I read. I have a number of other routers here I can try OpenWRT on, (Netgear WNDR3800, Buffalo WZR-600DHP and a DLink DGL-4500). Don't think the DLink is supported. The DGL-5500 is, though I don't have that one.
My Comcast Xfinity gigabit modem has bridge mode enabled. I have the ASUS RT-AC87U as the router in line serving the house network. It is running Merlin at the moment. A side note about that.....I am locked out of the router right now and the login screen is in Chinese or something but when I type user/password they come up in english, strange. Wasn't in Chinese the last time I logged in. Don't know how that happened, so I'll be resetting it I suppose.
My question for you is what the best way will be to setup the network using a second router to serve the Xbox One while using the ASUS router as an access point for everything wireless. So my thought was to use one of the older routers to install OpenWRT on and have that as the first router after the modem, but not enabling wireless on it but having SQM enabled. Then plugging in ASUS unit as a wireless access point for all things wireless since streaming has been working so well from the devise. Would this be the way to go or is there a better way to tackle it? Sorry if this was long winded but I wanted you to have as much info as possible from the get go.
Considering you have a 1 GBit/s WAN connection and want to do SQM on top, your existing routers are far to weak (1 GBit/s line speed routing already needs a powerful router, SQM even more). In your situation x86 would be the best idea, maybe a higher end mvebu device as well.
mvebu is a new one on me. I'll read up on it tonight at work. What do you mean by x86? Do you mean using a PC? Sorry if thats a dumb question. Well let me ask this then....since the ASUS router serves up the gigbit ok, can I run one of the lower end routers after the ASUS? That way the Xbox could just connect to say the Netgear WNDR-3800 with a LAN cable and SQM enabled. Xbox Live seems to limit speeds anyway. Wouldn't matter if gigabit got limited by the router used for Xbox connection.....or would bufferbloat still occur at the ASUS router because it doesn't have OpenWRT?
I wouldn't suggest using an 'old PC' (power consumption alone makes this a bad idea), but there are a small/ multi-nic PCs (often mini-itx or smaller, sometimes passively cooled - in general using less than ten watts idle) around that will do a pretty good job with LEDE (connectivity for wlan cards is often their weak point, but just can use your existing routers are mere access points), they tend to be fast and more than capable of 1 GBit/s line speed.
So IIRC, the ac87u is supported but the wifi is not. As the router is quite powerful, SQM should work fairly well. For the wifi, you're going to have to use a different router or access point. As far as OpenWrt is concerned, the wifi situation is decent but not great. Devices with Qualcomm ac chips tend to have firmware that crashes all the time. mvebu devices with the Marvell wifi tend to underperform.
@goblinX you can install LEDE on a low-cost mini-itx or even smaller PC, such as a gigabyte Brix or intel NUC. There are a variety of devices sold by "protectli" on amazon or by XCY on amazon, or all sorts of similar things on aliexpress etc.
Thank you everyone...I just so happen to have a Gigabyte Brix not doing anything. It's has an AMD processor in it. Not sure if it has two lan ports though. I'll look when I get home from work. Again thanks all.
A device with single Ethernet port can still be used by adding a managed switch so that the networks to be routed in and out are VLANs on the single cable to the X86 box.
Of course this will limit bandwidth to less than the theoretical gigabit rate, but not as badly as 500 Mb like you might first expect. The acknowledge packets are smaller than the data packets.
Another strategy would be to get a USB 3.0 gigabit ethernet adapter. Maybe not the best situation in the world, but might be better than the VLAN method.
This is getting more interesting by the minute. So I believe I can come up with the hardware for the x86 and I am going to use the ASUS for the wireless dumb AP, which I believe has DHCP turned off letting the x86 assign, right? So for a switch between the two I do have a Buffalo LSW3-GT-5EP/WH unmanaged switch. I know there is more control with a managed switch but would this work out for now as I'm learning? Also I plan on connecting the Xbox One directly to the switch, hoping to take care of my bufferbloat problem. Thats the reason this whole adventure got started.
The switch should work fine if you want more wired lan ports. If you want separate vlans for guest network or IoT separate network or similar, you might wind up wanting a managed switch.
Yes Xbox direct to switch hanging off the PC is best.
Thanks again.....will update as I get things together. This will be fun. I do have a Ubuntu server I put together a few years back running Plex, buried in the basement. Remembering command lines is always my problem every time I get away from Linux for a while.
Just as general advice, x86 hardware with two (or more) ethernet ports (there's no reason not to employ a 5-10 EUR/ USD PCIe card) is recommended if you're still in the "shopping phase". It just makes the setup simpler, more performant and even slightly more secure (emphasizing the boundaries between WAN and LAN).
I went with qotom q355g4 (4 intel giga ethernet ports) i5 processor. Small factor case, passively cooled. In fact I use it as 3 devices in one - tv PC, lede router and asterisk server. The last 2 are running virtualized inside virtualbox. Bit of fancy vlan tagging was required since the virtualized lede router is my primary router on the network.
I don't recommend trying such virtualized setup as a starting point though, it was more of a challenge for me whether it can be done.
I ordered a Netgear usb3 adapter to try this with the Gigabyte Brix for now. So I'll have my modem>Brix router>unmanaged switch>wireless AP (ASUS). Should the modem plug into the usb3 adapter or the ethernet adapter jack built into the Brix, or does it matter?
I decided to do it this way since I had the Brix here and it has hardly been used. Out of all the parts I have laying around, this will use the least amount of energy. If it works out, I may get something different to try.