I have very few experience with openwrt (only installed on rt-n16 with no internet access at the cottage).
Have other experience in custom firmware. DD-WRT, Tomato Shibby, Merlinwrt and other.
I'm quite good in networking.
Here's my setup now and future need.
Right now I have a fortigate 60E with 2 VDOMs. IT (internate facing) and HomeAutomation.
FortiAP as well.
Unraid with lots of docker and VMs.
My internal network is working really well and I do not want touch it.
Issue: fortigate 60E end of support is coming and I would like to start thinking for my possible solution.
One of them is to put openwrt with only 2 ports as internet facing device in front of my fortigate.
So here's my question:
Buy a nanopi R2S plus OR
Use a already available (free) 10zig thin client (intel J1900 8Gig Ram) and buy an usb3 to ethernet adapter.
not necessarily as low idle power consumption as newer x86_64 device (N100), everything from 6 watts idle, 11 watts, >20 watts (with unwise hardware selection, PSU, dedicated graphics, etc.)
without SQM, over 1 GBit/s routing speed (probably not more than 2.5 GBit/s though) - with SQM around 800 MBit/s
USB3 ethernet works, but I wouldn't call it pretty
no idea what "10zig" means
the baytrail platform is known to suffer from crashes (the onboard power delivery may not react quick enough to changing demands when waking up from higher CSTATEs), how likely you are affected varies from board to board and the use case (the deeper your system can sleep, the more likely to fall over this)
keep in mind that this is 12 year old hardware
With slightly newer x86_64 (Atom) hardware this would be an easier call in favour of x86_64…
Disclaimer: I'm very happily using a j1900 myself, the performance limits with SQM aren't an issue for me, 11 watts is more than I would like, but the device was cheap and back then alderlake-n (and cheap four-2.5GBit/s-port systems-) didn't exist yet. I have no experience with rockchip or other ARM-SBC-like systems. I do think x86_64 is a good choice for OpenWrt, on well selected hardware - but filogic 830 can be a viable competitor, with wifi 6.
Thanks for the great info.
Like frollic mentionned 10zig is a thin client. like the link.
Since I got it for free I will try that route and if I saw issue will look for an upgrade.
new hardware (n100) are here in canada around 250-300 $
This is actually quite nice thin client, there is mini pcie slot for additional nic and also sata port for some storage, check for cheap nic and make some place for it in case. I've used a nice supermicro server wit this cpu in the past with pfsense and 1gig pppoe line was served like a charm.