What are we running as routers / firewalls these days?

[blood]

I’ve been rocking a Solidrun clearfog base with Armbian for ~10 years now as my home router and was very happy with it until a few months ago when the newer software updates began to break it. I think the software support is beginning to rot due to not many users and thus no push to maintain it. I figure it’s time to start looking for a replacement.

 

I have a Rock 5 ITX that could do it but I’ve been trying to keep it on the vendor kernel so it can transcode in hardware for Jellyfin - but that vendor kernel has issues reliably detecting the SATA controllers - and I don’t want to have to reboot my router multiple times to get the hardware to work after applying updates.

 

i also just got a Radxa Orion o6 which is awesome hardware but still quite raw. I don’t trust it for a router and it’d be overkill anyways.

 

And I have some stupidly powerful x64 systems that eat a bunch of power but are otherwise up to the task. But I don’t want to go that way.

 

What do you use these days for affordable, performant, and low power routers? At least two gbe ports (10g or multigig preferred), enough CPU to NAT and forward for 500m/30m cable connection, and handle wireguard at a good clip. Preferred serial console … support for Debian / Armbian. I don’t care about a GPU. What do people use these days?

[eselarm]

I have been using 64-bit x86-64 and aarch64 virtual machines as router since 2016, in combination with a simple managed switch that separates and/or combines VLANs depending on ISP and physical connection (ADSL, 4G, fiber). Currently RPi4 where the router VM is 2 cores and 768MiB and connects to 'LAN' and 'WAN' VLAN/bridges. I can still max download at 350Mbps which is my max fiberspeed.

I also have a NanoPi-R6C that can replace the RPi4 eventually, it currently serves as faster clone/backup/development, like routing everything via 4G smartphone for example.

[blood]

Thanks - that's a couple options I should keep in mind:

1. adding the router to a hyperconverged setup
2. running one-armed against a switch via VLANs

I've enjoyed having a separate WAN and LAN link for so long that I fell into looking for boxes with 2 physical links but that's totally not a requirement and you're right.

[umiddelb]

I'm running Proxmox VE on small x86-64 hardware with multiple nics and then various LXC containers / VMs. One for OpenWRT, Unifi, Adguard Home, NextCloud, HomeAssistant, Freifunk-Offloader, ...