Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hardware for OpenWrt

wrtnode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 61 posts

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#4

Post by mhw »

A fun comparison: 20 years ago you could spend a large number of dollars (anyone remember how much?) on a dreamy Silicon Graphics Indigo2 Unix workstation. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indigo%C2%B2_and_Challenge_... its specs included:

* MIPS CPUs ranging from the the R4000 to the R10000, with clock rates of up to 250MHz. (This project uses a related MIPS CPU that clocks at 600MHz.)

* Up to 512Mb of RAM, equal to that in this project. The Wikipedia articles explains that the Indigo2 hardware could theoretically support 1Gb of RAM, but the thermal output of the DRAM available at the time was too great for the enclosure.

* 100Mbit/s wired Ethernet network interface (this project provides 802.11n wireless networking, which Wikipedia claims will reach 600Mbit/s).

I find it staggering that the hardware that was once powering a high-end workstation is now being put to good use as a low power router. It's good to see that after all this time you can still run a version of Unix on the same hardware though.

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#5

Post by Wicher »

Kliment wrote: post #3
tonypace wrote: post #2

This looks very useful, but price, RAM and flash sizes are not readily apparent. Am I missing something?

Can't find price but http://wrtnode.com/tech-specs.html says 512M RAM and 128M flash

It says 'Mb'. Chip sizes are frequently expressed in bits, not bytes, so this could mean 64MiB of ram and 32MiB of flash (I'm assuming mebibits (2^20 bits) instead of megabits (10^6 bits), for which 'Mb' is the SI symbol).

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#7

Post by azdle »

adultSwim wrote: post #6

Would this be a good router?

Probably not. It doesn't seem to have any Ethernet ports for a start. I think it's aimed more at being a wifi-enabled device that can do somewhat more complicated things locally.

Re: Hardware for OpenWrt

#8

Post by morley »

Is OpenWRT safe to use? The latest release, at least according to https://openwrt.org, was in April 2013. I'm not intimately familiar with what software packages it uses, but it seems like it could, at the very least, be vulnerable to Heartbleed.
Post reply on HN