Clearfog Base with Armbian continues to be awesome

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I bought a Clearfog Base shortly after they came out and have been running Armbian on it since early on as my home router. In general this is a solid SBC for a home router and light weight server.

• 2 x gigabit copper NICs, and an SFP cage - nothing dangling off USB here
• m.2 SATA storage - about the best support for performant storage of any SBC I know of; m.2 SATA leaves eMMC and SD in the dust. It's not NVMe, but for this little box, it's great.
• 1GB of memory - this is enough to run a few containers for light weight services like caching DNS and DHCP
• USB console - rather than exposing a UART on a few GPIO pins, this includes an authentic FTDI chip so all you have to do is plug it into another system's USB port and fire up picocom to get OOB management
• mPCIe slot - I haven't ever used this, but it's there if I wanted to
• It simply sips power. Seriously, just a few watts.
• Passively cooled, though I plugged in a small 5v fan off the gpio headers just to be nice to it

 

When it first launched, I had a bit of trouble getting anything after the first NIC working, but a bit of hackery with the device tree got the second copper port working easily enough. Getting it to boot off m.2 was also problematic at first, but someone figured that out, and wrote a nice doc. I sorta forgot about the SFP cage because the initial kernels didn't support it - but more on that later. For the most part, once I got it up and running I locked it down with a tight firewall policy and let it do its thing and it gave me zero trouble for over 1000 days. That said, I let it languish a bit and now that Buster is nice and stable, I found myself wanting some of what it had to offer - but I dreaded taking it down since it was my Internet gateway, and my ISP is finicky about other routers getting DHCP leases from the WAN with different MACs.

 

But I took the plunge a few days ago and reflashed to a fresh and modern copy of Armbian Buster and I'm really glad that I did...

 

For one, the mainline kernel support has really come a long way! Now the SFP cage works - and I am beyond happy that I am able to use it with 4g optics (I think from an old fiberchannel rig) to get a 2.5gbe link up between it and my ES-16-XG switch. For an older board, this was such a welcome discovery that I can't see myself replacing it for years to come. Secondly, Armbian Buster is a nice operating system. I converted my iptables ruleset to nftables without much fuss. In Jessie and Stretch, I had a pretty hacked together IPv6 setup using isc-dhcp-client, requiring a bunch of kludgy scripting to get delegation working properly - but now I am receiving a /60 of address space using wide-dhcpv6-client that I then advertise as /64s on a few VLANs with radvd, and stuff is working with so much less fuss. Buster itself has packages for some nice tools that I always had to build myself before (like exa). Lastly, I haven't done it yet, but I'm stoked to start using wireguard for remote access and that should be much less trouble than before the upgrade.

 

So yeah, for whatever reason there aren't that many arm SBCs that are all that well suited to being routers. Sure, you can do it one-armed with VLAN tags on a lot of systems, but they tend to have crappy storage and baggage from poorly supported video hardware that I don't even want to use. Clearfog Base has been legit for a while, and it seems to be getting better still. To everyone that contributed to making Armbian run well on this board, thanks!