11–20 of 58 posts
I am running gentoo on mine at the minute, I did have FreeBSD on it for a bit.
I tried a larger flash drive but the driver doesn't like it and won't mount the root partition, need to find one it likes. Or use nfs/smb but that is a pain.
I must say: the ERL is terrible hardware.
You can get some performance out of it if you're using Ubiquiti's kernel, because it ships with a series of highly specialized proprietary modules that offload packet handling to hardware accelerated modules, for their custom proprietary network stack. But their kernel is old and shitty, and if you want to do anything interesting with the ERL, you have to build your own kernel.
So for any mildly interesting usage, it fails considerably hard.
And even if you do opt to use their closed-source binary blob kernel modules and software stack, as soon as you try to do any sort of advanced networking, you run up against the limits of their acceleration modules, and the OS is forced to fall back to standard non-accelerated mode, and performance drops. Try using PPP, any interesting iptables, MPTCP, OpenVPN, interesting routing tables, or anything cool: performance drops.
I would be very happy to see some small networking hardware with multiple independent Ethernet controllers pop up on the market for a decent price; every other month or so my disappointment with the ERL moves me to re-research this. Unfortunately, the EdgeRouter Lite is not the hardware anybody wants for interesting low-cost networking.
The downside of this right now is that there are no binary packages for mips64 and there is no space on the device to store a ports tree so you need to cross compile everything. I am running gentoo on mine at the minute, I did have FreeBSD on it for a bit. I tried a larger flash drive but the driver doesn't like it and won't mount the root partition, need to find one it likes. Or use nfs/smb but that is a pain.
Related: I picked up a couple of Neoware CA21 thin clients on eBay real cheap recently. 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM, and 1 GB disk-on-module. I built customized (NanoBSD) images and run them read-only off of a flash drive. I connected a Garmin GPS 18 LVC to one and have my own stratum 1 NTP server for < $100.
Note that UBNT claims line rate throughput and provides proof via a commissioned Tolly report (no idea on their legitimacy). The fbsd image yields ~250mbps between two gigabit hosts. I've been eyeing one of these for a while and putting fbsd on it interests me, but not if it means a huge peformance drop (even if I wouldn't really miss it).
I've been running Gentoo Linux on my EdgeRouter Lite for a long time now. " rel="nofollow">https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MIPS/ERLite-3> I must say: the ERL is terrible hardware. You can get some performance out of it if you're using Ubiquiti's kernel, because it ships with a series of highly specialized proprietary modules that offload packet handling to hardware accelerated modules, for their custom proprietary netwo…
I've been running Gentoo Linux on my EdgeRouter Lite for a long time now. " rel="nofollow">https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MIPS/ERLite-3> I must say: the ERL is terrible hardware. You can get some performance out of it if you're using Ubiquiti's kernel, because it ships with a series of highly specialized proprietary modules that offload packet handling to hardware accelerated modules, for their custom proprietary netwo…
The downside of this right now is that there are no binary packages for mips64 and there is no space on the device to store a ports tree so you need to cross compile everything. I am running gentoo on mine at the minute, I did have FreeBSD on it for a bit. I tried a larger flash drive but the driver doesn't like it and won't mount the root partition, need to find one it likes. Or use nfs/smb but that is a pain.
Related: I picked up a couple of Neoware CA21 thin clients on eBay real cheap recently. 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM, and 1 GB disk-on-module. I built customized (NanoBSD) images and run them read-only off of a flash drive. I connected a Garmin GPS 18 LVC to one and have my own stratum 1 NTP server for < $100.
Unfortunately, only one shitty Ethernet port. I'd love to find fast hardware with multiple independent gigabit ports for an affordable price.
As an easier to obtain alternative to minicom, screen can also handle serial port communications quite happily for basic usecases (like this one). screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200 # Linux-centric example