U.S. Government Accountability Office Buy American Act
how about linksys/netgear, no made in china, not easy.
Would you please indicate where such GAO specification would be useful in government procurement processes, considering OpenWrt is a consumer device OS with limited functionality, albeit quite expandable via add-on modules, however still quite limited comparatively, and designed to operate constrained within very limited Flash/RAM resources.
For any serious commercial/industrial/institutional/governmental read GAO applications there are many other very serious products out there ranging in cost, including very respectable free open source solutions...
Not to mention that government contracts etc are more about operational security, operational quality, information security, service down time demands, support demands and so on.
This business level isn’t really about what “made in USA” device works with OpenWRT.
OpenWRT checks the feature boxes I'm looking for and is available on low cost hardware which is critical when deploying in quantity. OpenVPN support is very good with the routing table add/remove features I'm looking for.
Mainly what I'm asking for here is hardware that is easy to use and carries a little more prestige than something straight out of china. Buy American is something we have to comply with in some customers and I'm familiar with it but those customers aren't the pitch here for this product so probably a bad choice on my part. If we could meet Buy American though that would be great.
Previously I used Ubiquiti Edgerouter to fit this role and customer impressions of that were generally neutral to good where as I expect impressions of linksys/netgear to not be good at all. Supply chain problems and problems inside Ubiquiti have me looking for alternate solutions.
There are another dark cloud growing (or now maybe shrinking) in the future for Edgerouter and OpenWRT.
That is the memory leak problem that came with kernel 5.10.
But as far as I can see it seems that it actually made it in to the 22.03 branch. So maybe it still is some hope, the future will tell.
USA made low cost computer hardware, sounds like an oxymoron to me... GAO approved on top of that, things that make you go hhhhmmmm...
low cost in this context might be ~$100.
Does Belkin ax3200 comply
Hmm, Belkin is a US company owned by Foxconn. I didn't realize that before. Some might recognize Foxconn as the manufacturer behind Apple. That might be a narrative that would gain some acceptance.
The flashing process on that particular router isn't great at all though. Fortunately we don't care about wireless and just need a IP router that also runs OpenVPN so I will take a look at the rest of their products.
Consider some mini PCs. My guess is you could get something made in Taiwan or Thailand or such rather than mainland china, you aren't likely to get anything made in USA or Europe though
I hadn't considered that but it would be great for flexibility. I have concerns about getting cost down under $100 and maybe stretch to $150. At those costs I was thinking we would have to deal with these routers and the SoC they are based on.
MikroTik was considered early on before I even heard about OpenWRT. We rejected them because the UI is just awful, setting up any in quantity would take too long.
Same story with loading OpenWRT on MikroTik, from what I'm reading it is a painful process. Fine for a hobbyist but not for scale.
maybe friendlyarm/elec instead then?
i have their Nano R4s but it is made in china.
however this is a pure router and you'd need a wifi AP to bundle with it.
(i personally use a AC-Lite as its miles better than my old SOC all in one router)
Its snapshot for OpenWrt atm but will be fully supported Soon (tm)
Is it possible to stretch the functionality to incorporate something else you were planning to buy as a separate component? I agree mini-pc at $100 to $150 is probably hard, but at say $200 it's probably doable, and maybe there was $50 to $100 worth of other stuff you wouldn't have to buy if you had one. Also the speed at which your VPN will operate will be MUCH higher with a mini-pc than with most consumer $100 stuff.
Now that's interesting! I knew there had to be some Pi like board out there with multiple network ports. Flash process isn't bad. Will do some reading on these guys.
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i edited my post. theres a link to the openwrt status for it whilch has some benchmarks. I'm running it for master router for my lan (have a switch everything else is plugged into and a POE adaptor for the AC-Lite)
I love it. and with it being SDCard for setup? its set them up and copy the cards (you might need some sort of base script to give them unique id's / logins thou.
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Not really possible in this case. These are PLC modules and the VPN features we want are not built in so we have to supply a router to do it. Not to mention we don't want to put these modules on the internet with no firewall.
Perhaps something like the gl-inet devices would be good for this application.