Will the NanoPi R2S suffice my needs?

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
21

Glad you figured this out. I'm learning from you now!

I've only used ext4 before, and briefly at that as I got tired of losing my OpenWrt configuration after updates. Also, with a 4TB RAID1 NAS plugged into a dumb AP Ethernet port on my home network, I seriously lack motivation to create more storage on my OpenWrt router.

I used a USB HDD plugged into a dd-wrt router USB port years ago for casual file storage, but I soon outgrew the performance, reliability and administration limitations and went with a dedicated NAS.

22

Thanks, that’s assuring to know it’s working as intended. I will install the packages you mentioned here.

I’m using adblock-lean currently with hagezi pro and tif lists, probably due to the habit of using it on my archer c6 with smaller blocklists.
Does Adblock package write blocklists to sd card storage?

23

Wow, quite a setup you have there.

24

@fakemanhk saw you mention Tailscale in earlier comments, I have setup my R2S as an exit node but the speeds I’m getting on my phone using it is far too less, only 35 Mbps.

I’ve created a firewall rule for Tailscale like this

config rule
        option name 'Allow-Tailscale'
        option dest_port '41641'
        option target 'ACCEPT'
        option src '*'
        list proto 'udp'

But speeds from exit node are still horrible, I guess R2S is still relayed and not direct?

Any way to fix this?

25

If you connect from phone to OpenWrt (not using exit node), how's the speed??

26

Without exit node speed is normal. My ipv4 is cg-natted could that be the reason for using relay mode?

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27

No. They are saved in memory, of which you have plenty for the task on your R2S.

28

Thank you. Yes, the QNAP TS-228A NAS is nice. I did not want to give my data to the cloud and keeping multiple desktops and laptops synced and backed up was tiring. So everything is now on the NAS, and the NAS is backed up to a full size USB HDD air gapped except when a backup is made.

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29

Hey Sid,

Did you figure this out? Also which vendor you got the R2S from? Robu?

30

Exit node on Tailscale needs a lot of processing power to get speeds above 100 Mbps. But for normal usage with 30-50 Mbps speeds it is usable with anything like nanopi, rpi or even Apple tv.

I bought it from FabtoLab (link)

you can chat with them on WhatsApp to confirm availability of the product you want. They’ll charge ₹150 to deliver anywhere in India.

31

Might get some ideas here. But in general, the R2S is not an ideal tailscale device; it's an SQM, wireguard (in the kernel, not user space like tailscale), DDNS and adblock device :wink:

OpenWrt snapshot will soon be on the 6.6 kernel, which the tailscale link above indicates may help a little with version 1.54 and later, but miraculous improvement is not likely.

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32

Agreed, I just went back to using Wireguard which works flawlessly on the NanoPi. Only issue is that we’ve to setup every peer manually.

By the way, on the R2S I’ve turned on packet steering and installed and activated irqbalance, is there any other performance optimising step I can do?

33

You might consider bumping the min CPU frequency up a notch, but packet steering and irqbalance should pretty much cover it.

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/scaling_available_frequencies

from a terminal session on your R2S will show you available frequencies, and adding

echo xxxxxx > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy0/scaling_min_freq

to the System>Startup "Local Startup" tab in LuCI, where xxxxxx is the min frequency in MHz will set it every reboot.

How much this actually helps, I've not investigated. Probably not a whole lot since schedutil will ramp up the CPU frequency to respond to load increases anyway, but it may make your R2S a little more responsive to increases. You can trend CPU frequency and temperature with LuCI statistics to monitor impact, but raising the minimum frequency a single step should not increase temperature materially.

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34

Thanks for the helpful tips really appreciate it.

I downloaded the collectd-thermal luci-app-statistics packages you mentioned and over a week I’m seeing the R2S always around 45-47°C and it goes to 50 degrees or more than that while using Wireguard server from my phone, is that normal?

35

Better than normal in my experience. I don't recall exact temperatures when I used an R2S, but 50's-60's wasn't unusual. You're running ~10 below that, which is just fine. There will always be some variation based on ambient temperature and load.

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36

If it's not hitting beyond 70C I would never worry about it.

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37

Thanks @eginnc and @fakemanhk

What’s the best way to do a sysupgrade when you have resized the sd card partition or setup extroot on a usb drive for more storage? Especially when you have packages that are sitting on the extra storage?

38

What packages you are going to use? Previously on my R2S/R4S, I've installed many and I didn't even fill up the root, of course for LXC storage I use USB drive but I don't need to use extroot, just a simple storage mounting.

39

At first I had installed vanilla openwrt build and then manually downloaded the packages which ended up using more than 100 MB space.

Packages I had installed were sqm-scripts, ddns-scripts, samba4-server, tailscale, adguard home, wireguard, etc.

I tried to do an attended sysupgrade and it said not enough storage left for upgrading, had to delete some of the bigger packages for it to work. Then do the resizing again to get full storage.

40

Have you tried building your image with the firmware selector, using its drop down customize installed packages menu to include your desired packages in the image?

Attended sysupgrade can work for minor upgrades within a major stable release, but the firmware selector has reliably worked well for me. It's my "go-to" place to get an image.