5+ years, two power supplies, and various configurations later the day has come to retire the little faithful EdgeRouter that has served this household well.
With a near daily frequency of it just dropping the WAN interface until a reboot, the ‘Dad, the WiFi is down again!‘ cries from the internal customers has forced my hand to replace it.
But, to replace it with what?
The original purchase was painstakingly researched, taking into account the needs of separating ‘work’ from ‘home’ with VLANs, and ACLs. November 2018 the button was pressed and the little delight ordered.
Prior to the EdgeRouter (ERLite-3), since December 2014 I had been rocking an Asus RT-AC66U running OpenWRT.
My ISP provides a modem router known as the Hitron Chita which is branded to them, and heavily simplified leaving virtually nothing beyond basic port forwarding, basic SSID setup and a GRE Tunnel (in order to use ISP provided static IPs). The drawbacks significantly outweighed the ideal of having a static IP so for as long as I can remember the ISP modem/router is deployed in ‘modem only’ mode allowing me to provide my own routing device behind it.
My requirements are fairly straight forward, though with a 1Gbps downstream internet connection it needs to be able to keep up. Having previously had problems when it came to relying on software routing between physical ports I am acutely aware of the need for a CPU that can walk and chew gum.
The home network is pretty straight forward, mostly 1Gbps between points except for a 2x1Gbps LACP LAG between the main house and the office building.
So, whilst looking at a replacement for the trusty EdgeRouter I started to think about how to make sure it was going to last as long as its predecessors, that realistically means increasing the 1Gbps backbone to something faster.
The initial thinking is that the upstream ISP modem/router is only 1Gbps currently, and doesn’t support any LACP/Bonding capability so until that device is uprated there’s not much in the way of improvement north/south. This is a downside in reality in not using the provided ISP device which whilst only being 1Gbps does have 4x1Gbps ports to maximise throughput between devices.
I originally looked at 10Gbps capable equipment and decided it was too expensive, and settled on 2.5Gbps as an upgrade. I then dug into the various routers out there that have 2.5Gbps ports such as the TPLink Archer AX55 Pro but found it quite limiting in that it only had a single 2.5Gbps port. Then I found the TPLink Archer BE800 with its 2x10GbE WAN uplink port, and 4×2.5GbE ports, and WiFi 7 (not even sure if that standard is finalised, probably still draft) but at over £600 it was just too expensive to be a serious contender.
Somewhat dejected I then considered my other options and settled upon a Fujitsu FUTRO S920 thin client I had lying around, plus a dual port 10GbE BASE-T NIC and suddenly we were back in the game!
Some further testing and research needed having seen https://www.reddit.com/r/OPNsenseFirewall/comments/10p4tqz/fujitsu_futro_s920/ & https://forum.openwrt.org/t/fujitsu-futro-s920-help-with-troubleshooting-stability-reboot-issues/133465 first of all getting a baseline of power consumption from the EdgeRouter and then on the S920 with 2x10GbE Base-T NIC (I bet this is hungry).
I’ll be back in a few days with some initial test results hopefully…
EDIT: Just hooked up the power monitor to the EdgeRouter and we’re seeing idle of 7.8-8.8W so there’s the baseline.