Re: [LUG] Fwd: 🎉 Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB) PRICE CUT! Plus a FREE gift!

[mr meowski <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx>]

On 01/03/2020 09:31, Simon Avery wrote:
> These things exist - but at quite a high price point for the usual 
> reason that it's not used by the average consumer, and even SOHOs quite 
> often go with a bog standard isp-supplier router and nothing else. 
> (Maybe a vpn or two)  This is changing, but so so slowly.

This is the core of the problem - I know full well that professional 
solutions exist and plenty of them, I've been using them most of my 
working life. Which is how I also know they're frequently crappy and 
always expensive. It's exactly all the small SOHOs I'm interested in, 
all of whom could afford a <£100 RPi based mini router/gateway/thingy. 
But it would have to work super-reliably, and that's where the RPi 
proposition is likely to flake out I think.

Initial tests on a RPi3B+ running stock Arch looked great until iperf 
was bound to the USB gigabit adaptor instead of the onboard NIC:

NIC:    34.2 MBytes/sec
USB:    25.2 MBytes/sec

But there was additionally a nearly 5MBytes/sec difference between send 
and receive speeds on both interfaces. This is admittedly with 
absolutely zero network tuning but before I've started masquerading or 
routing packets. I'd imagine with any kind of moderate traffic load and 
some firewall rules the throughput between interfaces is going to drop 
quickly below my arbitrary ~25MBytes/sec barrier pretty quickly.

Let's find out I guess. Next I'm going to try opnsense and ipfire - as 
the two most obvious drop-in appliance type distros available - to see 
how they fair in a naive quick and dirty test.
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