Looking for router recommendations with SFP ports

3 years ago by themoonisacheese to c/selfhost

hey all, i'm looking to replace my isp's router (i know that i can, it's basically just DHCP on a specific VLAN) with my own one and i'm looking for recommendations.

here's what i would need out of it:

best price-to-performance ratio. the larger the NAT table it can keep in RAM the better (i run some things akin to ipv4 scanning)
OpenWRT support
at least one sfp port for internet access, supporting 5Gb/s.
at least one 1 Gb/s ethernet port
ideally 2-3 100Mb/s ethernet ports
wifi support: yes (don't need anything fancy, even 5GHz is optionnal but preffered)
LTE modem: dont care but nice to have

i had a look around the OpenWRT supported devices table but since it doesn't really list ports and i need sfp, it takes a long time to go through and read german router pages.

can anyone recommend a router that meets these at least partially?

Malcolm 5 points 3 years ago

Check out the Banana Pi BPI-R3. It’s getting mainline OpenWRT support with the 2023 release (RC builds available now). Amazing performance to price ratio. The only thing on your list that might be an issue is the 5Gb SFP. It has two SFP cages but I believe they max out at 2.5Gb. Also recommended to get the bundle with case and antennas included. Amazing price for what you get.

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themoonisacheese 1 point 3 years ago

Looks really solid. 2.5Gb/s is not a deal breaker, maybe I'll just go back to a lower plan since the only use I get out of it is avoiding network congestion between me and my server downloading at the same time over 2.5Gb links. Thanks for the suggestion!

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Malcolm 3 points 3 years ago

Wow, I'm jealous you live somewhere that you can downgrade to 2.5Gb/s!

If you go that Banana Pi route, just be aware that the process of getting mainline OpenWrt on the thing is a little unusual, but not difficult at all. Just requires a cheap serial adapter and spare micro sd card.

There device has onboard NAND, NOR, and EMMC, as well as the card reader. Not all can be used simultaneously, so there are dip switches that set what is booted/visible.

Official install method is basically as follows:

-Hook up serial adapter to the send/receive/ground pins on the board, open serial terminal in something like PuTTY

-Set dip switches, boot the sd-card

-In serial terminal select option to install to NAND

-Power off, change dip switches, boot to NAND

-In serial terminal select option to install to eMMC

-Power off, change dip switches

-You're done, now booting mainline on eMMC

Basically just putting the image on the NAND memory temporarily so it can be put back on eMMC since eMMC and sd-card can't be used at the same time.

The Banana Pi forums are a good resource in addition to the OpenWRT docs.

My only gripe at this point is that the mainline configuration by default only sets up a 100mb partition on the eMMC to install packages to. Some folks have had success resizing that partition but I wasn't having any luck there, so I may just compile it myself and set it larger. That change should be persistent through system upgrades after it's done once.

Anyway, if you or someone reading this goes that route, I hope this helps!

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vikingtons 1 point 3 years ago

This looks really neat. May pick one up to have a play around. Thank you!

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2xsaiko 1 point 3 years ago

Take a look at the Turris Omnia. 6 1Gb/s ethernet ports (5 for LAN, 1 for WAN), a SFP port (though only 2.5Gb/s), 802.11ax with 4 antennas, 2GB RAM which should be plenty. There's a SIM slot but I haven't tried it yet and according to documentation you might need a separate modem. It comes with their OpenWrt variant out of the box and is pretty much the best (at least by my criteria) all in one WiFi router I've found that runs OpenWrt. I was going to buy the QNAP QHORA-301W before I found this one (you might want to take a look at that as well).

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