Hello all, sorry if this has been asked before and I couldn't find it, but my Dad is moving into a new place and is getting gigabit fiber from verizon. He relies on me to keep most of his tech working, so he asked me to look into getting the networking equipment to take full advantage of that speed. Is there a off the shelf device or kit I could buy that could manage SQM at that speed? I've heard the RP4 comes close, but I'm certain that if you can get close to full throughput with a $35 device than it couldn't be that much more expensive to get something that handles it at full speed with some extra CPU left over for something else. I'm willing to spend up to around 500 dollars on the whole setup, but that would include wireless and a network switch, as the new place has CAT6 outlets in most rooms. Is there a good option that's closer to something off the shelf, like a NUC with a switch built in? Thanks for the help.
Thank you for the link, I read the article and I understand that there isn't a single device that can do what I'm asking about. Maybe I should have been more clear, I'm asking about what hardware i should look at, knowing that there isn't one small box that will do everything. That post gives as an example a x86 box as a server, a smart switch, and 2 APs. What I am trying to ask about is more specifically what I should buy that fits the outline given in that post.
I ran a J1900 motherboard as a combined router + NAS for a long time. Once the RPi4 showed it could be the router, I converted to separate those, because it was super inconvenient if I needed to adjust the router in some way the NFS server would go down and my desktop machines would freeze. There are also security concerns.
There are a lot of good 8 port switches you can use inside your LAN. Some of them are less suitable for connection to the WAN due to security issues. TL-Sg108e is a good switch for the LAN (security issues when connected to WAN). There's also a good 8 port device from ZyXEL, and I think in another thread we found the TrendNET 8 port TEG-s80es was a good choice.
For APs I use TP-link eap225 they're inexpensive and unlike Ubiquiti gear they're not "tivoized" (ie. prevent you from flashing other firmware by cryptographic signatures etc)
It highly depends on how advanced setup you (he) really needs. A 64-bit based Mediatek router will do the job just fine under normal circumstances (possibly not linespeed with SQM but I highly doubt that's going to be an issue) and you're all set. Get a decent switch like Zyxels GS1900 or 1920-series (I personally prefer the 1920-series) and that's it.
You can for sure over-engineer it but there's little to no point unless you know there's going to be a need for more functionality later on.
I'm personally fond of the RockPro64 + Dual port Intel NIC running FreeBSD, Zyxel GS1900/GS1920 and using a IPQ4***-based or Mediatek based router as AP simply because it gives me more flexibility and saves me a lot of time in terms of administration but it's not for everyone and it should still be well under your budget.
If you're in US, check out the Roqos RC10, it does gigabit speeds at about 15% CPU load, so there's plenty of room for other activities. But it's a small box (like most routers) and won't fit any storage, unless you're fine with attaching a small HDD tower, or whatever, via USB3.
They sell at $125, used, on eBay, but I got a new/open box for $60, and people say they go as low as $25 - Tips for getting cheap used x86-based firewall with full Gbit NAT (a PC Engines APU) if you are in the US - #132 by tdelco
If you need more wifi coverage than the RC10 can provide, use Belkin RT3200 as APs, they sell for $80-90, new, from belkin.com.
Doesn't seem to be something you can easily actually purchase?
Simple answer... NO
If you go the PC route though a SFF PC @ $150 gets you started
Adding a 4-port NIC - 1gbps $50 or 5gbps $200
2 AP's - 130/ea NWA110AX or 160/ea NWA210AX
This leaves 1 port open for a wired connection to something else or a switch if needed still. This comes in right around your $500 limit and gives you tons of options down the road for adding onto it.
I concur with this. For some time my router was an OpenWRT container running on an x86_64 machine that also served as my main file server: the resulting entanglement of concerns that ought to be separate caused a lot of hassle and inconvenience from time to time.
A good question to ask about whether to run a given service on your router is "does this service depend on routing, and does routing in any way depend on this service?" If the answer is "yes and yes", or at least "yes and mostly", then you might as well run them both on the same box. My router still runs MQTT and ad-blocking DNS, one as a process and the other as a container. Since neither of them are much use to me when the router goes down there's no real problem using the same machine to do them.
Edit: sorry, this was meant to be a reply to the thread as a whole, not to Tech_Junky's comment.
That's alright.
I can expand on this as well.
My setup rolled several devices into a single PC.
It started out with more of a desire to clean up all the devices I had collected over time / cutting the cord on Cable Tv and going OTA.
I started out with a NUC / HDHR / NAS to pick up OTA TV signals instead of paying $100/mo for cable.
After a few months of that though I dove deeper into consolidating things and getting more performance at the same time. I decided to build something substantial enough to hit current "needs" and future "wants". Since I like to play with tech this meant 8700K based system.
So, I went into design mode and came up with a system building through pcpartpicker to make sure things were compatible as I came up with requirements. I went through a few iterations of HW mixes from the basic NAS /DVR replacement to adding a PCI AC2600 card to host as an AP from within the PC. Took a dive into mining and added a couple of GPU's until I found mining cost me more in electricity than it mined in coins.
Over time I got sick of doing FW upgrades on an off the shelf black box and reading all of the exploits and needing to patch things all of the time.
Here's where I am now.
12700K / 16GB RAM / 5GE 4-port NIC / Raid 10 (4 + 1 spare) / tons of fans
OS running on 2 x SN850 1TB w/ cron syncing them vs R1 redundancy
Router / Switch / AP (NWA210AX) / Firewall
Plex / DVR / OTA recording / live
Raid 10 - 16TB + 8TB spare
Performance... 1.5gbps over wifi to the lan / R10 providing 400MB/s over Ethernet w/ USB 5GE adapter
Ethernet WAN speed hitting 1.5gbps / W/ VPN using WireGuard (Nord) slightly slower but close to wire speeds
12700K system w/o NAS Storage -- $1500
Drives I picked them up for ~$160/ea before the Chia craze
There have been some kernel quirks under 5.14 (8700K) / 5.15 (12700K). I've been running the system though as a router for ~4 years now.