Martin Cermak <marticak%gmail.com@localhost> writes: > So, the erlite router did work for me up to now. The board > started sound like a bee buzz and clearly became a recycle bin > material. But it did work just fine for more than 4 years now! > > So, I'm back at the original question. What hardware to buy today > for a little home router? What did the erlite router users upgrade > to over the years? Should I just buy the same thing again and > try to simply replug the usb stick? Any thoughts? If you have a full working set up on USB, then buying another ERLITE certainly is a very attractive option. Maybe buy two, so you have a spare. Long ago, I used a Soekris net5501 as my home router. For its day, it was a great box (512M RAM, 4 100Mb/s ethernet), and it was reliable. However, Soekris is no longer functioning. Beware that the net6501 model is NOT reliable, should you see them used. My recommendation to the broader question of "router box to run NetBSD" is the PC Engines apu2. This is a fanless system with a 4-core amd64-compatible processor: cpu0: package 0, core 0, smt 0 (also cpu1,2,3) It is sold w/o OS; most people run Linux but NetBSD runs perfectly (netbsd-8 for me, this week). It has 3 GbE ports and 2 external USB3 ports, and an internal mSATA slot. You can put wifi in an internal slot, but I don't know if NetBSD has drivers. This ends up being about $170, when configured for 4G of RAM and a 120G SSD. I have been using one for just over a year. The only issue is that the bios that was shipped to me did not allow netbsd to reboot properly, and I have to cycle power. This is fixed in newer BIOS versions (coreboot) and I intend to update, but I'm getting a spare first because being without a gateway is too painful. I believe flashrom on NetBSD can do the update, but I will prepare a tiny linux image on USB with the update just in case, and I have the $3 'debricking adaptor' which swaps in a working bios at powerup. (Yes, I'm on the paranoid side here.) In addition to the technical stuff, PC Engines has been great to deal with. The ordering process is slightly unusual: you basically submit a list of what you want and they email you an invoice with actual shipping (because international shipping is hard to figure out, but it's totally reasonable). You then pay and they ship; delivery to the US was fast enough I wasn't bothered by it (1-2 weeks?). (In EU you have to buy from an in-country distributor due to recyling rules, but in non-EU you can order from them direct.) I asked them a tech support question about the allowable voltage range on the 12V input (to power this from an off-grid solar/battery system), and right away got useful information from someobody who might have designed the power input circuit, but certainly really knew what they were doing, and pointed out something I hadn't thought of. https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm
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