I've been working on setting up a x86_64 router made from a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny M93p 10AB. I've gotten it working, updated, and even the wifi drivers going. The downside to these small units is the single ethernet port. I'm looking at either a USB3 ethernet adapter (https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B083ZM2QW3) or using a switch to connect the WAN/LAN traffic the the unit.
I've been going through the forum but haven't gotten a definitive answer if one option is better than the other. I think the USB option would result in less chance of issues getting things configured, but I'm not sure. Any advice?
I had it open the other day for a cleaning but can't remember if there was or not. I had started to look into the guide you linked but the addon cards seemed relatively expensive in my quick search. This would probably be the best option if there were major performance/setup issues in the USB/switch route.
depends on how many ports you need, a single port card is probably < $10 on ebay or Amazon.
actually, used Broadcom dual port gigabit cards were also < $10 on US eBay.
There are probably lots of stuff to complain to Lenovo about, but lack of online docs is not one of them. If you have trouble finding it, or find conflicting info, then that's because you're using some crappy search engine with a preference for ads. Like Google.
Go directly to the vendor and look there instead. They have all the info you need. And more.
enter some unique identificator in the search field, eg. "10AB",
select the matching model
look up all the info you want, e.g "Documentation"
There are other ways too. You could start at https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/ which is linked from the lenovo.com front page. Using the same search term works there as wll. Or you can search for your specific model or serial number to go directly to the relevant model page.
Honestly, I'd go with a single, external managed switch and be done.
Not at all your setup, but here's what I did:
About 10 years ago, I had an i5 3350P CPU in an ASRock z77 pro3 motherboard. I ran VMware ESX on it. On VM was an OpenWRT. My network connection was exactly one Intel E1000 1GBit PCI NIC going to a managed switch.
I reached 1GBit full duplex (meaning: fully saturating 1GBit upload at the same time as fully saturating 1GBit download) with little CPU utilization -- through that layer of virtualization and through exactly one cat5e cable.
So my cheap suggestion would be getting a managed switch first and see how things are going. You're likely going to need that thing anyway. That might just turn out fine, and you're done.
I have one of those devices - while it works with the correct driver installed, I'd be careful putting heavy traffic loads through it as it's AXE88179 based and there are many reports of that chip suffering all sorts of problems suspected to be related to IRQ load with gigabit traffic (100Mbit traffic is fine). To be fair, most of the reports in relation to OpenWrt are with Raspberry Pi (for which I bought mine, but I've only used it on a Pi 2 which is USB bus throughput limited to much less than a gigabit) and similar ARM systems; an x86-64 system may well not be as noticeably affected.
If you need to use USB, I'd get a 5 or 8 port gigabit dumb switch and connect to it via an RTL8153 based USB to ethernet interface (e.g. TP-Link UE300) which are known to work much better in OpenWrt. Shouldn't cost you much more than the above device.
Yes. But you only need the serial number to get warranty information. Which is irrelevant for a device this old.
The 4 char code (10AB) is enough to get all the relevant docs and software. And if you have the full 10 char board id, like 10AB000AAA, then you'll also be able to look up the original hardware configuration, localization and included service contract.. This ID is easy to read out on a Linux system by running
I wasn't able to get back on here for a couple days and I find lots of great help. Thanks everyone for your input!
I opened it up before getting on here and there are no additional pcie slots as you mention, but I could possibly swap out the wifi card that is in a mini pcie slot since ethernet would be more useful than wifi.
Currently there is a DisplayPort in the 'optional port' spot or this may have been a nice easy choice since there is already a DP and VGA. I won't need a monitor attached anyway other than maybe troubleshooting if something goes wrong, certainly not three!
I'm only on 100down/30up so there should be plenty of bandwidth on a single gigabit port. I was more worried that the wan/lan might cause issues when trying to go through the same port (or be a pain to setup), but you seem to have dispelled that. I'm currently using an older WRT3200acm as the router which could possibly work as the managed switch, but I'll have to look into that.
Thanks for the advice on the AXE88179 based device. Currently only have 100Mbit down and 30 up, but would like to future-proof a bit. I'm hoping to replace a WRT3200acm router with this x86 so the WRT should work fine as an unmanaged switch if I go this route.
I ran my internet for about 5 years on a single port thin client running openwrt (probably whiterussian back then ) with a free Cisco 29xx managed switch as the “port multiplier”. It performed perfectly until I had more money to upgrade to something a bit more easy to manage. I also did the same thing for a stint with pfsense on a vm, but stopped because I got tired of taking the whole network down to patch the host os.
