How is the software support? It seems like you could alternatively get a nice quad-core x86 Intel box with a handful of 2.5G ports off of AliExpress for around $120(you'd have to bring your own RAM and SSD in those cases though) and enjoy full Ubuntu/OpenWrt support.
According to the official website, it will officially have Android 12.0, Debian 11 and Buildroot support and will unofficially support Armbian, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04 and Kylin OS.
As for x86, I'd really like to try and avoid it for a router.
That seems a bit pricey considering you still need a few items. I've had a QOTOM for quite a while that has served me well. Looks like they have Intel four 2.5 Gb ports with an N100 for pretty cheap.
Throw a stick of RAM and an m.2 drive in there and it would be cheaper and more capable than the Banana Pi. You could even throw Proxmox on there and virtualize pfsense.
You just described my setup of about a year. I’m struggling to update opnsense, last time I tried it just stopped working and I had to restore a snapshot from proxmox to get it working again. If anyone reading this has any suggestions I’m all ears!
Just updated proxmox and opnsense with few snags and it just worked. Phew.
I've been running OPNsense on Proxmox for years now, it just seems to plug along. I run ZFS for the datastores and do a snapshot before updates, but I've never had to use one.
Recently got it working with HA and inadvertently tested it by having a drive failure on my primary node. I remoted in for for something else and realized it had failed over to the second node about a week before, and I'd never heard a word from the family about internet being down.
That’s great. It’s been chugging along beautifully with no downtime for me too. It’s just that one failed update attempt, losing internet and network while it was down, and needing to go Ethernet directly into the box to do the snapshot rollback late at night made me afraid to try again. Last night it took me two hours to update everything , first proxmox 7 to 8, then OPNsense needed 4 rounds of update and reboot but each one was seamless.
I’m also on ZFS with two primary mirrored drives. Do you have to check zfs status regularly to see if a drive has failed? Or is there some kind of warning system when logging in via SSH?
I’m thinking of turning my rarely used windows gaming PC into a proxmox host with a Linux gaming VM for my next adventure.
Edit: realized it was a whole node that failed, not just a drive. Cool setup! I’m not there yet. I’m curious about your setup, what’s between the modem and the router?
Proxmox will report SMART errors via email if you set that up. You could also run a system like Nagios to run the checks via another box. I actually run Home Assistant with the Proxmox HACS extension to monitor it. It's on a VM so that isnt' ideal, so I also run Node Red on the little I5 PBS box to send alerts if it can't contact Proxmox itself now. The node going down without me realizing it was a bit of a wakeup call, though it failed my docker host and router over so seamlessly it was astounding.
I have nothing between the router and the modem except a switch so each Proxmox node can have a NIC on the external network and failover/migrating can pick up the modem and use it. I suppose I could VLAN, but the servers have 2 network ports anyway so that works fine.
The link you posted has nothing to do with this SoC?
You're not going to get 2.5G over wireguard on the 3588, but you are definitely going to get over 1G.
Wireguard scales well with cores, but due to the way big.LITTLE is implemented on the 3588, it could lose performance if it tries to split the workload between core complexes.
The competitor is the Orange Pi 5 Plus, also has 2x 2.5GB Ethernet, same SoC, more USBports, no integrated WiFi+BT (optional M.2 module), eMMC connector, M.2 NVMe socket (up to 2280).
I have one, and Armbian has an official release for it and works quite well with a Kioxia 512GB NVMe.
But at this moment I'm just saying there are similar boards out there, and the 5 Plus might be slightly cheaper (no wireless though). Radxa also has a similar board based on same SoC but only has one GbE port and price might be similar to the Banana Pi.
Not when I consider the price of replacing this box when it's no longer supported.
And even ignoring the longevity issue, $69 is a small premium for superior specs and open firmware, which I am unlikely to get anywhere else.
I find that spending a bit more for tools that work much better and last much longer is nearly always the right choice. Better functionality, less waste, less hassle, and usually less money in the long run.
I work in industry with MediaTek chips. We basically have to reverse engineer them to get anything done, because they refuse to give us anything, and what they do give us doesn't work.
They outlined processes of what happens next since vote was approved on 1-17-2024. According to this, I dont expect anything until end of year or next year before product is ready to be sold
They have been around for a little while now. Had one in college ~4 years ago. Upstream kernel support was a little rough but spec wise they were impressive alternatives to the RPi 3B
Banana Pi, Orange Pi, etc really took off a few years ago when raspberry pi got harder to find and was marked up like crazy. Even now it's still more cost effective to buy the clones, and they've expanded their sbc offering to include features not available on the original pi.
Though many of the alternatives have rather poor software and support, and as you can't just load an iso meant for a raspi you have to do most stuff by yourself from scratch.
As an example, I have home assistant running on both a Raspi and an Orange Pi board. One of them was a simple iso flash and is still supported and updated, the other took few days of tinkering to sort out and the newest Debian iso for it was uploaded in 2020.
But if you know what you are doing, you can get great hardware for really cheap.
How hackable is it? Are other distros or OSes devs going to be able to get their system ported to it? Seeing Debian, Gentoo, NetBSD, or OpenBSD on this would be pretty cool.
Armbian lists several BPi boards as supported. Has anyone run Armbian on the BPi stuff?
Yeah, meant the website title, but in truth it’s tough to tell what’s astroturfing bots vs people here. And honestly these things with 6 2.5GbE ports is plenty impressive, not sure why the website felt the need to goose it like they did.
Can the N100 even run two ports at line speed, let alone 6? Having 2.5Gps ports is cool and all but even using it as a 2-port firewall I’d be curious what throughput you could get with it.
I've got a Protectli VP2420 running OPNSense at home, which has 4x Intel i225-V 2.5gbe running on a weaker Celeron J6412, and I was able to get the expected iperf performance of ~2.35gbps from some brief testing between two directly connected machines. I didn't really do any deeper testing than that though, and I'm not currently doing any crazy threat detection stuff.
All of these AliExpress Protectli knockoffs are great for keeping prices reasonable and I'm yet to come across anyone that's rued taking the opportunity to buy one.
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