Pi4 + UE300 + PPPoE + VLan for 1Gbit Connection?

I`ve had Gigabit asymmetric fiber for a couple of years now, and after switching provider last month, I am finally fed up with the shitty hardware that’s included.

I already have WiFi 6 APs around the house with important devices connected over ethernet, and would usually install Unifi gear - but I have been let down in the past.

Reading here, it seems that the Raspberry Pi 4 + UE300 adaptor is getting epic performance.

But to replace the included Modem, I will need to configure PPPoE over a VLan.

I have seen people mention performance of the RPi4+UE300 as a router, router with SQM, one mention of PPPoE, and one with VLan tagging.

But I want to 100% confirm that everything combined will work well on the RPi4 before I buy everything and (in the words of my wife) “Buy a bunch of stuff that frustrates you for a whole weekend and ends up getting thrown in a box”.

Would the RPi4+UE300 combo handle routing for a 1Gbps Asymmetric over PPPoE with VLan tagging and SQM?

Please and thanks!

The short answer is "it could, mostly, once tweaked, installed and optimized"... but depending on your budget it's not the most ideal solution for over 550Mb/s if you are not a tinkerer, require multiwan, are not familar with imagebuilder or newer online image building sites and/or packages...

If you can afford it, have the space, can manage the sound... get x64... (or another armv8 with multiple hardwired nic's)

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I could tinker a bit to get things set up - but I do intend to “Set and Forget” once tinkering is over.
MultiWan is not a factor right now, if I was to go that route I would go for a PFSense box and do the load balancing on there.
I am fairly technical, with sufficient Linux experience, so I’m sure ill get along with the image builders fine.
There is not sufficient space, its a small hole in the wall where the fiber comes in, and I could just about squeeze the supplied modem in there (with WiFi switched off).

Thanks for the points, Ill add them to “Things to be aware of” list!”

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I set up that arrangement* back in February -- including several VLANs in addition to the one required by the fiber ONT -- using a daily build/trunk release; it was straightforward and painless and works extremely well out of the box. By now you can just use 21.02.

For optimum performance during very heavy loads you'll want irqbalance, or you can just manually distribute the irq affinities. I chose to do the latter (a small script called from /etc/rc.local), because I like things to be a little more deterministic and predictable; it makes it easier to do reliable comparisons and track problems.

(*Edit: one difference is I used the Vantec dual-Ethernet USB3 adapter; it was only around $31 then, so not crazy expensive compared to two UE300s and uses the same chipset; I wanted a neater installation and and a free USB3 port. Rock solid, unlimited uptime for over six months under heavy use by two full-time telecommuters, etc. Since I have a POE switch I used the POE HAT for power, as I'm not an admirer of tiny wall warts, considering them much more of a stability risk than some people do USB3 adapters.)

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Go ahead, no issues.

I use PPPoE over a VLAN to work with my ISP's GPON HGU in bridge mode, works just fine. I don't have a gigabit connection, but it was too much to handle for my Archer C7 v4 if I wanted all the bells and whistles (SQM, etc)

For the WAN side of things, I have both tried a UE300 dongle, and doing it over a VLAN through a switch (using my Archer C7 v4's 5 port gigabit switch, thank you OpenWRT) then trunking everything back to the Pi4's onboard NIC (router on a stick). Both work flawlessly... For gigabit speeds I'd rather go with the dongle to get an actual 1Gbps dedicated interface.

As @Cheddoleum mentioned, you want to set up irqbalance/packet steering/both or manually distribute IRQs at gigabit speeds to let the Pi4 stretch its legs. You also want a RTL8153 based dongle, since that's well supported, and it doesn't generate much CPU load at these speeds. You guessed it, the TP-Link UE300 is RTL8153 based.

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I tried to look for this locally but couldn’t find it anywhere :frowning:

Are you not using the built in Pi Nic?

Thanks, Time for an order!

Well I don't know where you're located. It's now terribly overpriced at amazon.com (US).

Yes, but I do a lot of local routing across several internal networks, so three NICs is kind of the minimum. eth0 (built-in) handles regular LAN stuff on VLAN 1, and front and back door cameras on VLAN 10, as they're untrusted (off-brand chinese cameras) they cannot make connections to LAN or WAN, but LAN devices can connect to them to pull streams for viewing and recording. eth1 is DMZ on VLAN 20: certain externally exposed web and mail services, plus a bittorrent client container that has limited write access to a specific NAS volume. It also carries VLAN 40 which is mainly chromecast audio and video devices. Slightly inconvenient but I don't want them to have access to my LAN stuff because Google is relatively evil, so I jump through a few hoops on my phone to use them. eth2 is WAN on the VLAN that our ONT requires, plus a completely isolated separate subnet for my wife's telecommute. Plus a bunch of other stuff, but you get the idea.

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Few months ago I was also asking for setup for a gigabit connection with SQM as an option and this Pi 4 setup was suggested but I rather did summer things so I postponed the purchase.
Now I’m about to order the parts and happy to see that the support is even better, back in summer only snapshot option was available which scared me a bit since I’m new to Linux however so far I managed to get everything working based on instructions and hopefully I won’t stuck in the setup.
I don’t mind tinkering if it can get me near gigabit speeds. I’m sure that you’re more advanced user than me so go for it, this is the best low powered option

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