![GL.iNet GL-AR300M16 Portable Mini Travel Wireless Pocket Router - WiFi Router/Access Point/Extender/WDS | OpenWrt | 2 x Ether]({"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31csNZxKe7L._AC_SS130_.jpg":[130,130],"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31csNZxKe7L._AC_SS260_.jpg":[260,260],"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31csNZxKe7L._AC_SS390_.jpg":[390,390]})
![GL.iNet GL-AR300M16-Ext Portable Mini Travel Wireless Pocket Router - WiFi Router/Access Point/Extender/WDS | OpenWrt | 2 x E]({"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gQQAA8ozL._AC_SS130_.jpg":[130,130],"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gQQAA8ozL._AC_SS260_.jpg":[260,260],"https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gQQAA8ozL._AC_SS390_.jpg":[390,390]})
OpenWRT / LEDE and Linux people, this is the router you want!!
It's a $25 router/firewall and although it's only 100Mb, if your internet connection is less than that, (like most people) it's all you'll every need!
It's as fast as the network will let it go, see below for detailed test results. This thing keeps up with whatever you throw at it.
Now, if you're not a hacker and you just want an amazing travel router, you should buy this. The included software is very good. You'll be very pleased. There are slightly more expensive models, but there is no reason to get one if you're not planning to expand it. This one does it all.
The GL.iNet team have done a fantastic job and the included software is excellent if that's what you're looking for. They even answer the questions on the forums.
Now, HACKERS! Ok, this one will run the latest version of OpenWRT/LEDE with no special anything. Just load the firmware from the web interface and reboot and you're up in a clean, official install of openwrt / LEDE. There is another model with twice the ram, but you have to do some special hacking to get that one to load the main distro. (I bought four of those, so I'll be learning how!) This one just plain works. Once you flash it, it will default to 192.168.1.1, NOT 192.168.8.1, so the instructions on the label on the device will be wrong, so update them.
Note that you can use GL.iNet's included OpenWRT, and it's just fine. Might be a little out of date, and you can upgrade it from their site and it will do pretty much everything I'm going to describe below. WIth the main distro though, you have access to more packages and stuff. (If you're not a hacker, stick with GL.iNet's software! It's good!)
This device has TWO network interfaces, and they are both native hardware interfaces. Not vlans to switch ports like many routers, not USB devices like the Raspberry Pi (which I love, but it ain't quick) These two ports let this thing work as a fantastic router/gateway/firewall. It has a 400MHz, 32bit MIPS processor that is purpose built for routing network traffic. This thing is pretty powerful, it's like what you might have had as your main computer in 2000 or so. But, it doesn't have the graphics stuff, and it doesn't have hardware floating point (which you don't need for this) and so it's tiny and lean. It only uses about 1 to 1.5 watts!
I ran some tests with this thing. The built-in wireless access point is good. It's intended to work with only a few computers that are in the same room with it. It get's the job done. For what I'm doing, I'm using this as a firewall for an entire office. Yes that's right. I've done this kind of thing before so I know it's up to to it. For this purpose, I'm going to use a few access points for the wireless, so I'll be turning off the built-in wireless and just using this device as my firewall /router.
For the test, I installed the latest LEDE 17.04.1. The box rebooted and I was up. I connected the WAN port to my network switch with an IP on the main network. Then I plugged the LAN port into a small portable gigabit switch. I turned off the built-in wireless. I set the address of the LAN port, and enabled the DHCP server. I opened up a port on the WAN interface so I could get into the device from the WAN port, which you leave off by default, when you're not doing a test like this.
Now, I put a netbook with a 100Mb network port on the main network. The netbook is running Debian Stretch. This is going straight through a wire, the little box is NOT part of this test. I ran iPerf several times between the netbook and a server, in both directions. 94.3 to 94.5 Mb/sec was typical. This is JUST a wire, remember. So this is our baseline.
I plugged in two netbooks, each with a 100Mb interface, into the small switch. They're running Debian Stretch. I booted them, and now they're DHCP clients to the little GL.iNet box. They have a different subnet address than the main network. They're being IP Masqueraded by the little box now. That means it has to process every packet with network address translation, and maintain a conntrack table.
I run iperf from the netbooks to the servers, one by one. 93.6Mb/sec! Holy crap! I do some repeated iPerfs and I get 94.1 in the best test. That means this little sucker is doing pretty much wire speed.
Now, for the real test I run to iPerfs at once, one on each netbook to a different server. The total Mb/sec is the same as in a single test. And that is fantastic. Wow.
So now I set up some port forwards on my little router, so that the iPerf port on the netbooks is visible to the main network, where the servers are. I run iPerf in the other direction. This has to NAT in each direction. No difference.
Now, I have set up OpenWRT in the past to use two ISPs and do balancing and failover, which is something you have to pay a lot of money to get in a firewall router. To do this I will need another network interface. I would make it a second WAN interface in that case. So, I want to test a USB network dongle as my interface. I'll make it a second LAN interface for this test. (I know this sounds weak, but I have used a USB network dongle with openwrt in production in the past and it was rock solid for years.) I loaded the loaded the kmod-usb-net-asix package. Then, I plugged in a Belkin 100Mb USB 2.0 dongle. I went into network interfaces for LAN, and looked in the 'physical settings' tab. 'eth2' now is available. I didn't reboot or anything! I check the box to add it to the br-lan bridge along with the LAN interface. I unplug the little switch from the LAN interface and plug it into the USB dongle.
I didn't even lose the SSH connections into the netbooks! So now, on this interface, I run iPerf. Now, you see, this has to do a lot more processing on each packet, because it's a software driver that is running over the USB subsystem. So there is more overhead. Also, it's running over a software bridge. So this should be slower. I run the same test. 88.1 Mb/sec!!! That's amazing. This thing is amazing.
So, now I can have this unit be my internet gateway and router. I can use a USB dongle to be my second interface for WAN, and use the mwan3 package to do automatic failover so if my ISP goes down, my office just stays up.
If you install the package luci-app-qos it also installs the QoS subsystem with a nice interface. Tune this right and all your VOIP, Skype, and similar things can be given priority so they're nice and solid even on a busy network. No more dropouts and hanging connections.
There is even an internal serial port but I won't get into that.
Anyway, if you're looking for a great OpenWRT/LEDE box that will run it right out of the box flawlessly, this thing is what you want!
If you want a router and firewall, for 25 bucks you get something that does what other do that cost thousands. And it's only 1 watt and SILENT!
A note on Memory: This thing has 64Megs of memory. That is actually a lot for openwrt. It is actually using its ram as the root filesystem. It unzips everything into memory when it boots. So more RAM is really more space. But, I loaded all these packages and I still have 50% left. The memory needs of the networking are pretty constant, so it's not a problem at all in everyday use. If you want to do a lot of crazy hacker stuff, you might want more. But I'm fine with 64MB. (If you need more storage space you can plug a USB thumb drive in and move the root filesystem to it giving you tons of space and freeing up RAM, but that's a very advanced topic. See the OpenWRT pages for more info)
| Processor | 400 MHz |
|---|---|
| RAM | 64 MB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11bgn |
