Hi everyone,
I’ve been using an AR300 travel router for various travel activities, and it has served me well. A few days ago, I managed to pick up a NanoPi R4S (which doesn't offer WiFi capabilities unfortunately) for a great price on eBay, and I’m looking to combine the two devices to improve my setup.
When I travel, I really enjoy the convenience of the AR300 interface for handling captive portals and routing all traffic through a VPN (they use their own interface on top, but luci is still accessible). However, the AR300’s limited computing power has become a bottleneck, especially when pushing a lot of traffic through the encrypted tunnel.
Since I’ve heard bad things about USB WiFi adapters, I’d like to reuse the AR300 as the device that handles incoming and outgoing WiFi traffic. Then, I want to route everything through the NanoPi R4S, which would handle the VPN, possibly apply some network filtering (e.g., AdGuard), and provide local services via Docker containers. It would also be great to have the ability to control specific clients on the network.
I know this is probably a bit complicated for a newbie and I'm missing a lot of vocabular, so I’m looking for any guides, projects, or resources that could help me set this up.
I’ve already read about the "dumb AP" configuration, but as I understand it, that setup just adds WiFi compatibility to an existing network. My use case is a bit different since my WiFi AP (AR300) will also act as the internet interface (e.g., signing in to captive portals). I also need to ensure I can still access the AR300’s control panel to log in to these portals.
Any tips, advice, or pointers to relevant guides would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!