Per the title, I’m looking for a hardware recommendation for 1Gbs throughput with CAKE QoS enabled. The firewall rules would be minimal. No VPN’s are planned.
My ISP is a 1Gbs symmetric internet provider via fiber to the home which is why I’m asking for 1Gbs. I’m looking for a small low power device for this. I currently have a NanoPi R6S running OpenWRT and it’s doing a good job but I just don’t like the interface or how backups work. Most of my endpoints are Debian based Linux so figured I might as well look at a Linux based solution. IPFire looks great but I just don’t know what to run it on. I don’t need wireless in my router and just need two interfaces (internal and external).
I would just try a dual port mini pc. Problem with Protectli is they load a non standard bios that doesn’t have the APCI turned off, so parts of the router goes to sleep and will cause networking malfunctions.
But picking one in your price range, I would try one of these:
But look around on ebay because there are used I3 NUCs that go for under $80 that would work just as well.
Well, that’s why I asked. I’m looking for recommendations and not validation. That MeLe looks nice. The problem I see with the I3 NUCs on Ebay is finding one with dual Ethernet ports.
it all depends on what you want and the nuc is a cheap solution even if you have to get a usb to ethernet adapter. Just threw it out there since you were looking for cheap alternatives.
So is there a reason you don’t want to use the Nano Pi for ipfire?
I didn’t think the NanoPi R6S was supported for IPFire since it’s ARM-based. I’d have no problem using it if it met the throughput criteria of 1Gbs with CAKE QoS.
I have been using the Lightning Wire Labs Minbi Appliance for 2 1/4 years now without any issues.
The version I have, uses the apu4 pc engines board but that has been EOL’d due to the cpu being stopped by AMD.
A new mini appliance has been released end of 2024 which looks to be more powerful than the previous one that I am using. It is designed to maximise throughput across all cores from all nics just as with bthe previous version.
I think you need to look carefully at what you are looking at purchasing if you need and want to achieve 1GB/s throughput rate.
Maybe other systems will be able to do that but make sure that the system and the nics used are able to support RSS (Receive Side Scaling) to ensure that all cpu cores are able to be used to manage the network traffic and not just ending up with one nic per core.
Just to make it clear I don’t have any relationship with Lightning Wire Labs other than being a happy consumer of their previous mini appliance, which is still going strong for me.
I was looking for this last night but the site was down for some reason. Having looked at it now though, $700 seems a bit much for what it is. It does look nice though.
I have a Protectli device with the N5105 processor and I’m getting 1gig symmetric fiber installed tomorrow. I will let you know how fast that processor can handle QoS.
BTW, if you’re going to buy a Protectli, buy direct instead of from Amazon. You have more configuration options that way and the price is the same. I have purchased two appliances from them and have been happy with both.
Thanks. I didn’t think this question would be so hard for the forum to answer. I’d have expected that there would be others who had a working IPFire solution at 1Gbs throughput with QoS enabled. I’m hesitant to get any new hardware until I know for sure what hardware is required since I have a working solution with my NanoPi R6S with OpenWRT.
The idea is that QoS is designed for low bandwith, high density networks, so not many people use it on such a high speed network as the benefits tend to become unnoticeable. But I like using QoS even on high speed lines because I like the idea of minimizing latency and also like the visual of seeing what types of traffic are being used on the QoS graphs. I’m currently using it on a 250/25 connection with success. When I upgrade to 1000/1000, I’m curious how QoS will perform. I’ll report back when I do.
if the spanning tree of the network as in the throughput and switching functions are within reason with the network load, QOS will actually degrade the network’s throughput. But it depends on the hardware.
I run a 10Gb network and QOS actually lowers my bandwidth. It could be a software buffer issue or something like that why a process would slow down the connection. Because QOS doesn’t use any of the computation parts of the cpu so I would suspect a memory allocation.
QoS definitely benefits the most on low bandwidth connections but it’s still possible to affect latency sensitive applications with high bandwidth transfers running in the background. Since I use this computer for remote work, I don’t want anything to affect things like online meetings. The little NanoPi R6S with OpenWRT does this but I was never really fond of the interface or how upgrades/backups are done. If QoS weren’t an issue, I’d probably just get a little Grandstream router (GWN7002) and be done with it.
Thanks for checking this. I am reevaluating my need for this at all based on your original post. I did some testing again and can get an A rating without QoS and an A+ with QoS enabled but the difference is only about 10-15 ms latency on the download size. My results aren’t as good as yours – the ISP might already be doing their own QoS. Or maybe it’s the hardware because I used to get grades of F on this bufferbloat test with 430ms added latency.
Currently the R6S is not supported because the we not compile the bootloader for the R6S. Im not sure if it is supported by stock u-boot yet or if it need patches…
