.

[Oubadah]

.

 

[kvic]

This is an interesting testimonial.

Going through the list of requirements, I was about to suggest ER-X which fits so well..until I read the last paragraph. It's not imo as ER-X has WebUI and Wizards.

Never mind. lol

 

[sfx2000]

Moving to an ER-X might meet your needs...

Going back to the Alix - when you mentioned you reset it... have you gone into the console via the serial port and see what's going on there? If it's not booting there, I would suspect that the CFCard has gone bad...

 

[garyd9]

Just because something is old doesn't mean it's bad. Quite of a few of the "improvements" made to newer generation consumer wireless products seem like companies using early adopters as beta testers.

If you want to stay in the consumer realm, based on what you posted (and what I'm familiar with), I'd go with one of the newer generation AC-1900 wireless routers. The idea is to get something with a newer (faster) processor for handling your 200/200 speeds, with less concern over the which new (and not yet matured) wifi standards might be onboard. I think there's a newer generation AC1900 Asus router variant that might meet your needs.

The netgear R7000 is a great little wireless router (once you get rid of the netgear firmware), but it can't route IPv6 at 200 megabit speeds. It should be able to do it for IPv4 if you enable CTF (broadcom's acceleration), you don't go overboard with QOS and other things that increase routing overhead. The wireless performance is good as well.

(I can't comment on the ER-X product, as I've never used it.)

 

[sfx2000]

How much is required just to get an ER-X set up. I'm getting mixed messages reading the amazon reviews.

It'll be more involved perhaps than your run of the mill consumer grade router/AP, but if you can set up pfSense, an EdgeRouter is similar enough..

 

[sfx2000]

I tried with putty, but upon booting the Alix all I see is ~3 rows of dithered block characters and nothing else. I might have been doing something wrong, though. I haven't used it since the initial PFSense install. I was using the right connection type, speed 115200 etc.

Screen shot?

 

[abailey]

If you want to go with a Ubiquiti ER-X I don't think you would have any problems setting it up. I have an ERL but have not used it in quite a while. I hooked it up this past weekend and it was still on version 1.5, lol. I loaded the newest version, 1.9, and it looks like what you see in the video you linked too. I did a factory reset and set it up with the wizards. It was incredibly easy. Just like you see in the video above.

 

[netwrks]

I bought two Ubiquiti ER-X -SFP's (one as a router the second as a DHCP Server / switch). Great price point and easy to config. More flexibility (port wise) that the UBNT PoE5 (that I am now using as a standby router).

Willie Howe has a bunch of Ubiquity tutorial videos - https://www.youtube.com/user/williehowe/videos

 

[Nullity]

I think you guys have convinced me though. I'll get an ERX, and hopefully it won't end in user instigated disaster.

Please report back on your general experience with the ER-X. Plenty of us are very interested in that device.

 

[kvic]

I left the default "only use one LAN" option, so it bridged all the remaining ports for use as a switch. I thought I read that this would disable hardware acceleration, but hardware acceleration was only on the ER-L, right?

The remaining ports aren't exactly "bridged" in the common sense of use on this forum. It carries a bit negative. In fact, the switch in ER-X is flexible and surprisingly capable. Once configured as switch, member ports are at wire speed. You can read a bit more details here: http://kazoo.ga/the-switch-in-edgerouter-x/

I'm certainly not the first guy on this forum to know and talk about ER-X. But probably the first one attempting to understand its SoC capability inside out. The MediaTek SoC in ER-X is surprising capable. It comes with various HW offloading (aka acceleration)..HW NAT, HW QoS, HW crypto.. It was only a matter of time for Ubiquiti to support in their firmware. Surprisingly Ancheng (the guy no longer with the firm) was very aggressive on the effort. Partly I guess due to very good market reception and user requests. So as of ver. 1.9, HW NAT is supported. HW crypto is also enabled for IPsec.

 

[sfx2000]

I'm certainly not the first guy on this forum to know and talk about ER-X. But probably the first one attempting to understand its SoC capability inside out. The MediaTek SoC in ER-X is surprising capable. It comes with various HW offloading (aka acceleration)..HW NAT, HW QoS, HW crypto..

Not much different than Broadcom or QC-Atheros - Ralink (now MediaTek) has been doing this for a long time, and they're pretty good at it...

For more detailed info on that SoC - http://ftp.mqmaker.com/WiTi/Docs/Hardware/MT7621.pdf

 

[sfx2000]

So the ERX does do some hardware acceleration, but it's not affected by "bridging" ports.

It's a different board support package, so many assumption that are current on this board (primarily AsusWRT, but others as well) - their BSP is based on VyOS, which is a true router OS...

I guess this might be one strike against the ERX for absolute beginner users, at least until all the stock with the old bootloader/s is gone. It didn't take me long to figure out how to check and update it, but there was no single source with complete step-by-step instructions.

The bootloader issue was unfortunate - and configuring things beyond a consumer AP does require a bit more knowledge about networking to make an effective solution...

 

[kvic]

In hindsight, I should have recorded an "instructions your grandma could follow" guide including this and the router config. There are small things that could throw a beginner, like the fact that the CLI appears not to register your keystrokes when inputting the password.

Very true. Usually afterwards one will lose motivation to write down the minute details he/she has gone through.