Mainboard as Internet Router + Wireless AP + NAS Project

[D.H]

@Jeremiah_Jones

you can set resource limits,

My plan was to set resource limits via systemd slice groups. Not sure which is more efficient, that or containerization, but I suspect systemd might be.

@Peter_Schofield

you can’t readily (if at all) use an intel wifi card because they don’t support AP mode, they’re client only cards.

I don’t think this is 100% correct. My AX210 is advertising AP mode capability in iw list, but I believe that is available only on the 2.4ghz band, per this site: en:users:drivers:iwlwifi [Linux Wireless]

I will take some time to experiment and see what I come up with.

Many 5ghz and 6ghz seem to be a problem here as well, because the LAR is not hearing any transmitters on those frequencies, so they are defaulting to disabled. Going to be another head scratcher I think.

[Jeremiah_Jones]

@D.H

My plan was to set resource limits via systemd slice groups. Not sure which is more efficient, that or containerization, but I suspect systemd might be.

At least in LXD, resource limits are set via the kernel Cgroups features. This seems to be similar to how the systemd slices are implemented. The LXD resource limits are very nice in that they can intelligently kick in; from the first link:

When using a percentage value, the limit will only be applied when under load and will be used to calculate the scheduler priority for the instance, relative to any other instance which is using the same CPU(s).

My gushing love of LXD aside, there should be less overhead by doing everything natively. Although, I suspect resource usage will not start to play a role until surpassing the “1GbE with QoS and several vlans” level of routing, since the humble Raspberry Pi 4B can do it with only one of its cores. A real question is how you’re gonna hammer this thing!

[D.H]

Mainboard finally showed up a couple of days ago. Just a few “unboxing”… Err, unbagging pics for y’all:

Inner box removed from outer shipping wrap, which was expanded paper padding packed:

Inner box again packed with expanded paper padding:

Anti-static bag inside of the expanded paper padding:

Finally, the empty board itself:

One odd little thing, it did not come with the tiny screw to hold down the m.2 2280 drive. Erps…

[X_S]

Keeping an eye on this one too. I’m having router problems and am considering buying a Framework 11th gen i5 mainboard (once they become available here) and turning that into a router. I’m leaning towards pfSense, although I wouldn’t mind something Linux-based.

I only really need USB-C to RJ45 adapters for my WAN and LAN ports, as I have a dedicated WAP already. Still, it will be interesting to see your entire parts selection, as it may give me some new ideas.

[balupton]

I’m currently running a diy nas on gocryptfs on btrfs across 6 hdds attached to a raspberry pi 4 shared over samba, which works great. However I’m wanting to move to moosefs on xfs for the extra flexibility, however moosefs requires lots of ram, so I’m considering a framework mainboard as the moosefs master then all other devices (macos and raspberry pis) being chunk servers and clients.

[D.H]

Interesting, I’ll definitely check into those!