Looking to upgrade my old tplink ac1900. Was quick browsing for openwrt and found the banana pi r3. Does anyone have one? or opinions about it? Just looking for a general consensus that it is effective and reliable. Other suggestions are welcomed but don’t need a debate ;)
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Skirting the edge of self hosting, I was faced with this question last month. I ended up with a Ubiquity UCG Ultra. It has all the network management tools on-board and for the first time in a long time I can manage my network from anywhere on the planet.
Access can be via a web UI, or an app.
I don’t have any insight into the hardware you mentioned but I wanted to say that I put opnsense onto a low powered computer a few years ago and love it. It is extremely configurable and easy to use with some pretty good documentation out there.
Old thin clients and mini PCs are great for this. Many either have a half sized PCIe slot or can take a second network interface using the WiFi m.2 slot and a 3d printed bracket to mount the nic port.
Was quick browsing for openwrt and found the banana pi r3.
One thing that surprised me when I was looking to upgrade my old router ith OpenWRT is if a firmware for your router supports ALL of the features/hardware of that router. In my case, Wifi support was not supported, so I had to disregard using OpenWRT as a choice.
So be sure to look carefully at the firmware that you find. I personally had just thought that if a firmware exists for your hardware that all of the major (but maybe not minor) features would be supported, and that is not always the case.
You’re best off splitting the routing and WiFi tasks into separate hardware. Buy yourself a used ruckus unleashed r550/650 or r510/610 depending on how much you want to spend for wifi then run routing on whatever hardware is fit for purpose. I usually slap OPNsense on something like a dell/wyse 5070 j5005 mini PC, any mini PC with a PCIe slot will allow you to build a 1/2.5/10GbE router with open software. Chinese N100 router boxes are cheap now too, or you could reuse an old mini PC of some kind.
I don’t like rolling my own router using arm boards anymore, router distro support for them is unreliable and j5005 pulls <10W anyway.
