Looking for Gbit / multi-Gbit router available in the EU

Note that MBps and Mbps are not the same units: Mbps means "megabits per second" and MBps means "megabytes per second". SATA 3 max speed is 6 Gbps or 600 MBps (wikipedia), whereas in networking speed is almost always specified in Mbps or Gbps. 1 Gbps = 125 MBps.

Uhh... you guys buy electronics from Alibaba? The only thing I ever trusted them with was a rubber duck with a helmet for motorbike handlebars haha.

But seeing that there don't seem to be a lot of all-in-one options that would outpreform the AX50 that I'm running now, I'll probably end up with a mini PC w/ OPNSense like you linked, when I learn more about OPNSense that is.

By the way I think this is a better link to what you meant.

EDIT: It's an AX50 / AX3000, not an AX5000

It's been as low as 145€ new, and 130€ used, on amazon.de, according to CCC .
250€ is def a no go.

Oh, I never thought to check with them, they do indeed ship here. The shipping cost would be more than what I'm used to though.

Yeah, the AX50 I have goes for about 80€ and it has wifi6. Not that good of an upgrade haha.

That one seems to be exactly the same as the AX50, the only difference beinf WPA3 support.

Now THAT'S what I'm talking about! That one also actually seems to be available locally to me on-order. I can't find any info about whether it can run a VPN server, but surely that would be fixed with OpenWRT. If I could have that but with more 10gig ports, I'd be over the moon.

Oh. It was late at night when I wrote that haha, thanks for pointing that out. Now I actually have a justification for going with 10gbps.

The QHora-301W is still WiP , see here : Adding OpenWrt support for QNAP QHora-301W

Thanks for the heads up. Do you think it's going to receive good support once it's done?

Fully right. I dont like this either... But regardless of what you buy, 99% chance its built in china. I bought the "old" version with the celeron j3160. An xsk branded NUC. I flashed the open source bios (coreboot) from protectli, which cost 2x the price. So if you can give me a reason to pay double, for the same hardware??? It now says its a protectli box :wink:
Edit: Ow, also: i dont trust the memory and harddisks, so i would buy them separately. It is running without any issues, but i have to admit, i ran tcpdump on my router for a few months with nothing behind it to be sure there are no backdoors. (If there were, i guess they would have been in the bios)

Okay, so seeing that there really aren't many devices to choose from, a better question I think I should ask is

Is OpenWRT right for my setup?

I originally wanted to go with OpenWRT because it always comes up as the best solution for all-in-one devices and I didn't want to introduce too much complexity to my network (and I wanted to never use proprietary router firmware again). I only learned from this thread that OpenWRT is aimed at lower performance devices (thank you @diizzy) and that not that many devices support >>1Gbit speeds and/or WiFi 6, whether they are supported by OpenWRT or not.

So far, the only option suggested that had 10Gbit ports was the QNAP QHora-301W, and that's not supported by OpenWRT so far (thank you @shdf). The only other option I found by myself was the Zyxel NBG7815 (5x 10Gbit ports!) but that one isn't supported by OpenWRT either.

So, right now I'm flirting with the idea of getting an x86-64 mini PC and running OPNSense (which came up better than PFSense in my research), which I also only learned about from this thread, thank you again @diizzy. Some people seem to say that setting it up is somehow more difficult than OpenWRT, but I looked at some tutorials and there was very little that I wasn't familiar with already. It would come at a cost of higher complexity of an extra switch and access point, but in the end, I'd still be managing the same services one way or another. I'd just have to remember to be on the lookout for BIOS upgrades for the PC.

However, the number of options for mini PCs with integrated >>1Gbit support is still not very large. I like the Protectli lineup, but they only seem to have one device capable of 2.5G, and it doesn't come cheap (over double the QHora-301W that has two 10G ports). So I'd probably have to get an expandable PC to put in a 10Gbit networking card, which, for two ports, would still run me about the price of the QHora itself.

In conclusion, I really have no idea of what I should even be looking for. Please help.

Oh, I like paying less for sure, but Ali is a place where I wouldn't ever bet on receiving the actual listed hardware.

Also this. One big reason I'm getting a new device at all is that the one I have has been exposed for sending my data to a third party. I don't want to run any risks on a piece of HW that has access to all of my network traffic.

Fyi, i run proxmox on mine (it says pfsense/opnsense, but it works well on all linux/unix flavours). In a VM, i run an openwrt and an opnsense. Opnsense gives some network issues that i cant seem to figure out. Ooenwrt works like a charm!
I also run a bunch of other containers, contexts and VMs, but thats out of scope for this chat (and is explained in another topic on this forum)

Edit: important for me, was passive cooling/no moving parts and a low tdp cpu, with ample power to run openwrt

with 2 x 10Gbit ports there is also the Asus GT-AXE16000 :sweat_smile: but it will never be supported by openwrt.

That's a strange conclusion to draw :slightly_smiling_face:. The better conclusion would be you need beefier hardware to compensate for vendor specific proprietary hardware acceleration etc.

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The correct conclusion would be Linux, not
Openwrt, since the 2nd only supports what the 1st provides.

I do think that OpenWrt with its relative light weight (but also somwhat lacking in features) opkg and focuss on updates by flashing a new firmware is taylored at devices with limited storage/price. That is not the class of whitebox servers used for more potent routers,and more the class of cheap 'plastic' all-in-one consumer routers, no?

We are at an interesting time with access links in the 1 to ~10 Gbpas are becoming available, so the definition of what a cheap all-in-one needs to deliver is shifting somewhat... though as @Borromini wrote most of the heavy lifting is going to end up in acellerators.

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Interesting, could you elaborate on that a little?

I also run a bunch of other containers, contexts and VMs

I have a separate gaming-PC-turned-NAS that I run my other services on, I like to keep critical services (like a router) on separate silicon.

Obviously i can elaborate. This is why I/we are here :wink:

Basically, my setup looks as follows:

What changed: i added the 100% similar setup for my opnsense install as i explained in my openwrt install. Shut down the openwrt, so my full network runs on opnsense. Literally EVERYTHING works, traffic shaping to eliminatie bufferbloat is implemented with queues. My wireshark etc also works fine. I do video calls, my wife too... So low latency is never an issue. Now... For some strange reason, when, in the evening, i play PUBG or CSGO, i get sometimes "lag detected" issues. Nothing shows on the VM, no errors in proxmox/linux, no mentions on opnsense console... I have changed virtual drivers/offload/... I stopped all IDS and IPS functionality, added (virtual) cpu, mem, ... Nothing helps!
So for the moment, i am (re)running my openwrt 19.blabla version for my gaming rig alone. How? Disabled all DHCP services and manually route my gaming rig through the openwrt VM. The house runs on opnsense/uses dhcp, even the static ips are given by dhcp.
My openwrt never gave any issue... Ever! So:
Once the new openwrt implementation with nftables goes.stable, i will 100% switch to openwrt again.

If anyone can help debug the opnsense issue, i would be happy to help, but this is not the right forum for that :wink:

If you want to dig deeper/more help, i am on holidays right now, so i type everything on the phone.
Meaning, when i get home, i can do proper testing/explaining.

Well, the BSDs have a different approach to traffic shaping than Linux. Sure there is an fq_codel version for *BSD, I believe it is competently implemented (I hold BSD developers in high esteem), but it might not be identical to Linux's implementation. Also the *Senses tend to focus on other things beyond and above mere traffic shaping and AQM, so I believe what sqm-scripts does or what sch_cake does almost single-handedly for Linux is simply not a top priority for PF-/OPN-sense.
So what I want to say, your issue might not be amendable to debugging, because it might not be a bug, but simply the consequence of having a different focus.

Caveat: not everybody needs/wants to accept the trade-offs involved in maintaining lower latency (mainly lower throughput), so OpenWrt/sqm/cake are neither required nor without alternatives, but IMHO a pretty decent package pretty much leading the pack (it is debatable by how much).

Fully agree. And completely aware. Thats why i played with everything to try to figure out where things go "wrong". I failed up to now. Believe me: Nothing frustrates me more than failing on network issue debugging. All help/guidance is appreciated, but pollutes the current topic :wink:

That OpenWRT does only aim at low end devices is only partly true. Some defaults are not very optimal for big x86 setups but I can run OpenWRT as a router VM with NICs passed through and it does happily route 25 Gbps between vlans. So if your hardware is fast enough nothing stops you to use OpenWRT in busy setups with fast uplinks, you may just have to tune some things to fit your needs but that you will have to do on *sense as well.

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