Router/Hotspot/NAS Combo for Temp Construction Office?

[Norcalz71]

I am in the process of setting up a temporary office trailer on one of our construction sites for myself and 2-3 other guys. We will be working off a hotspot for broadband access and I wanted to setup local storage (1tb or less) and printer sharing locally for cheap/easy if possible. We currently are using a sprint zing hotspot (seems to be 2-3 years old probably need to swap that out) but it has no provisions/USB male to plug into a router.

This is a 4-5 month job, trying to setup everything for $300 or less, it doesn't need to be fancy, and we are running off a generator that will only run during business hours so we will be offline and not constantly connected to the work domain.

If I were to just grab a 1tb USB 3.0 drive and run it off a USB port from a router (i run asus AC66 at home) and then also hook up the printer, am I able to add/register that share and the printer share (both off the router) with our work domain so that when everything is "on", we can see the rest of the network? All laptops/phones that would be on this network in our trailer are registered to our work domain.

The alternative would be to get a router and a small NAS (QNAP ts131 maybe, i use a 251 at home), but for what we are doing (basic local file storage, pdfs, .docx, .xlsx, etc) I feel like the router itself as the NAS attachment point should be sufficient, I just want to make sure I can avoid conflicts with our domain settings. We would use a secondary external USB drive to make a weekly backup and bring it back to the main office to sync with the servers so that we aren't syncing the whole drive over the hotspot.

Any problems with this plan?

 

[System Error Message]

I wouldnt expect great NAS speeds from a consumer router. It really depends on what you want from a router.
Your internet speed matters in the choice.
Routers do not have the best print and scan server, linux has the best print and scan server through cups and xsane as only the server needs the drivers.
ARM A9 or A7 or even the newer 64 bit ARM based routers will not achieve much NAS speed, about 50-80MB/s. Qualcomm's chipset isnt mobile based so it lacks many features that can make a router fast for NAS and CPU related things.
Normally i would suggest x86 based as you can get intel NUC with wifi if wifi range or performance doesnt matter and install something like pfsense and openNAS. For a consumer router, ASUS has a lot of features but nowhere near as much as a 3rd party firmware like openwrt or tomato so if you install a 3rd party firmware on a consumer router choose one with good hardware.
by default consumer routers do not have hotspot, some 3rd party firmwares might. This is why getting ubiquiti/mikrotik or x86 is better as they come with hotspot and do other things better. intel NUC would be the best choice if you need NAS and print and scan server.

 

[sfx2000]

I'm going to try to keep this simple...

Set up a small workgroup perhaps - easy enough with Windows, and use one PC that's on 24/7 to store local docs, perhaps not even doing this, if your home office has a document repo, either via Web or Windows networking over VPN...

Keep it simple... see what your needs are...

 

[CaptainSTX]

As sfx 2000 said keep it simple. Many printers (even inexpensive consumer grade printers ) have an Ethernet port. Use this Ethernet port and plug the printer into a LAN port on your router. Windows does a much better job of sharing resources than trying to get a printer to work reliably using a USB connection to the router and then hoping the router's USB drivers work.

 

[stevech]

I do have my Synology NAS talking to my Epson Workforce 630, via the ethernet LAN. I had the printer on WiFi but despite close range, the printer lost WiFi every couple of weeks and needed a reboot. The PCs on the WiFi and wired LANs access the printer too, independent of the NAS. The Apple iPAD is the main reason for the printer support via the NAS. The printer does not have Apple's <expletive> proprietary Airprint protocol. But the NAS does make the iPad via WiFi think the printer is Airprint. This was done with a few mouse-clicks in the NAS admin.

I could get a newer printer with Airprint, just for the iPAD. Grr. But the '630 printer is the ONLY one I've ever owned that had zero problems. Every HP I owned had crap software and wore out in a year or so. The '630 is great. Never HP again.

So the above is why I don't use the printer's USB port.

 

[System Error Message]

i still have a basic HP printer that still works. Using cups and linux is a great way to network a printer since the printer's own networking solution tends to be horrible. It wont even connect to my AP. cups handles all the software part so the server only has the drivers with no printer software to worry about and this actually lets me use "pirated" ink without the printer complaining or refusing to show the ink levels so you could use this and refill your own cartridges and the printer wont reject it.

CUPS works with airprint http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/AirPrint . And if you want to make it driverless with windows machines you will need to use PDF printer on the server, it is a bit complicated to set up but using windows you just use the general windows printer drivers. If you really want to reduce the cost than get a raspberry pi and use that but i suggest using an intel NUC as you could install a linux server on it and use it as both a router and server if you need something compact, fast and configurable.

The other thing about CUPS is that there is an app for android that adds itself as a printer with no drivers needed.

 

[Norcalz71]

I wouldnt expect great NAS speeds from a consumer router. It really depends on what you want from a router.
Your internet speed matters in the choice.
Routers do not have the best print and scan server, linux has the best print and scan server through cups and xsane as only the server needs the drivers.
ARM A9 or A7 or even the newer 64 bit ARM based routers will not achieve much NAS speed, about 50-80MB/s. Qualcomm's chipset isnt mobile based so it lacks many features that can make a router fast for NAS and CPU related things.
Normally i would suggest x86 based as you can get intel NUC with wifi if wifi range or performance doesnt matter and install something like pfsense and openNAS. For a consumer router, ASUS has a lot of features but nowhere near as much as a 3rd party firmware like openwrt or tomato so if you install a 3rd party firmware on a consumer router choose one with good hardware.
by default consumer routers do not have hotspot, some 3rd party firmwares might. This is why getting ubiquiti/mikrotik or x86 is better as they come with hotspot and do other things better. intel NUC would be the best choice if you need NAS and print and scan server.

I might like this idea, have to check into it further. Would I use the NUC in conjunction with a router as well or do it pull double duty (never looked into them much at all).

The reason for the cheap/compact solution is we are in a pretty sketchy part of town for this construction project - the trailer getting broken into is not a better of if, but rather when. Being able to shut down the local file storage at the end of the day and take it with me would be great, or at least over weekends. In one day on the hotspot VPN'ing back to our main office where all our job files currently sit, we used about 1.2gb of data which will add up fast. Almost all our work is word,excel, PDF, and CAD files for two of us, do as long as the solution would keep up with two people being on (a third minimally sometimes) we would be golden - it will never be more than 4 people once in a blue moon.

Sent from my LG-H810 using Tapatalk

 

[System Error Message]

if you get an intel NUC with an iseries CPU it can handle both router and file duties, it merely depends on the OS you installed. You can install VMware and use both pfsense and openNAS on the same machine or install a linux server OS and use that instead. An intel NUC is basically a thin client so it looks less fancy than a fancy consumer router. Since it has usb3 im pretty sure it has good NAS speeds with the intel CPU. The load on a NAS isnt the number of users but rather the rate of data.

Its important to know that the intel NUC (with iseries CPU) is very small uses a dual core laptop CPU so while it would have no issues keeping up with networking tasks and other tasks it should be able to keep up with your requirements. You can also take the intel NUC with since you can install a 2.5 inch hard drive in them and you can use mini-PCIe based SSDs as well. They are as big as a 3.5 inch external hard drive.

 

[Norcalz71]

I'd like to look into the NUC option, but given the time I have I will probably be done building this project and back at the main office before I got the VMs working properly.

Given the small size and requirements, would the throughput on a router attached USB 3.0 drive likely keep up? I'm reading tested speeds on the ac68u of 45MB/s down and 10-12MB/s up, which has to be better than the 10-20Mbps I'm getting via our hotspot and VPN'ing back to the server at the main office.

Does anyone know if I can "add" the router to the work domain, so that whenever the router is active and fed broadband by the hotspot, it essentially acts as a wired/wireless access point to our work domain and we won't have to log into the VPN on each computer individually (router basically does the authentication)?

I'm a construction engineer moonlighting as our 3rd strong IT guy since our IT is way understaffed for the company size, hence the potentially oddball questions. I just need something that gets us running quick with local file storage, wireless internet for 3 laptops, and print sharing inside our trailer.

Thanks again

Sent from my LG-H810 using Tapatalk

 

[System Error Message]

quick and cheap for print sharing i suggest a raspberry pi 2 using cups and xsane if you want scanning. With cups theres the possibility of not having to install drivers on your clients. No router print server can match this and xsane allows scanning via http. You can also power the raspberry pi 2 from the usb port of your router. All it involves is just installing the mainstream OS and following online preconfigured tutorials. If you dont need speeds faster than usb2 you can also use this as a NAS but because of the 100Mb/s ethernet you will be limited to 12MB/s per direction.

For a router you need to remember that NAS also uses CPU as with VPN. However at your internet speeds that could work. While ASUS routers with RMerlin firmware certainly do fine for VPN they lack hotspot capability but you can give that task to the raspberry pi 2 assuming it doesnt do any sort of routing. While the raspberry pi 2 is a quad core ARM A7, it might not have any encryption acceleration so it would be a poor VPN server.

If you are trying to create some sort of bridge between one work place and another using a tunnel than yes you can use a router to do that. However regarding domains that is something i am not sure of. It may be possible on a consumer router but you may also need to configure from terminal.

Using something compact like a thin client or intel NUC you can get all these features easily through a linux based OS or running pfsense and openNAS (examples) as VMs but giving priority to pfsense as pfsense and openNAS dont do what the other does but is quicker and easier than configuring a linux server OS from scratch.