Background and requirements

I have been considering x86 based solutions for years. Ever since the 12th generation of Intel CPUs ( Alder Lake ) came out in 2021 I started to consider it seriously, but at least as of 2022 there was nothing on the market that fulfilled following requirements:

  • enough CPU/GPU power to transcode 4k video if need be
    • I wanted to get rid of separate HTPC
  • cool enough to be passively cooled
    • noise is not fun and I have ~fanless setup in my office (with exception of NAS and gaming PC, neither of which is most of the time running)
  • at least 4x 2,5 gigabit ethernet ports
    • I wanted to upgrade my home infra default from gigabit to 2,5 gigabit ports (and extra switch seemed unappealing at the time) At the time, the best possible option I could find out was Alder Lake-N based Intel N100 boxes, but they didn’t quite have the oomph (just 4 CPU cores) I wanted, and they were also reported to be quite hot. So I left the idea parked in 2022.

The Chosen One is chosen (early October, 2023)

We had some casual discussion on Aiven Slack channel sometime after summer of 2023 about home routers, and N305 cropped up. There had been large number of relatively recent (released within year) network devices using it, and it motivated me to go looking around the Amazon website for candidates after having read some reviews which stated that the devices were bit cooler than N100 based earlier models.

Specifications

What I found was:

  • HUNSN micro firewall appliance for 335€
    • Intel Core i3 N305 CPU
    • 4x 2,5 GBe port
    • .. bunch of other things I did not care about
  • Lexar 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe SSD for 111€
  • Crucial 32GB 4800MHz CL40 RAM for 87€

for grand total of 533€, which while not cheap, is definitely over-provisioned for what I had planned for it. In general I prefer to buy the hardware with the assumption that it will be used for a long time and due to that some over-provisioning at the time of purchase is fine. (For example, my current NAS box is ~13 years old at the time of this post, as it was built in 2011, initially used as my workstation but subsequently as NAS which is only used for occasional backups and it is most of the time powered off.)

The shipping, or lack of it

I pulled the trigger early in October, but there was some shipping SNAFU, as the initial device apparently entered EU customs but never reached me, and subsequent one was delivered to my home perhaps month later without any interaction with the EU customs from my part.

Installation (hardware)

The device itself looked pretty much as advertised (and as I had seen in some reviews): small, and black.

It was also easy to open with a screwdriver:

and after installing memory, SSD, and plugging it to monitor and keyboard, software installation could begin.

Installation of the operating system (~15th of November, 2023)

The operating system

The actual software stack has evolved quite a lot after I bought the device, but the initial installation consisted of minimal install of Debian stable ( Debian – The Universal Operating System ).

Debian has been winners’ choice quite awhile when wanting stable base for systems (I have personally used it from 1997 onward and dabbled with it bit before that)

Configuration as code

After the initial installation (which was pretty much manual), I chose to subsequently maintain the configuration of the device as code using PyInfra ( pyinfra ). I chose it just because I do not like domain specific languages for configuration and Pyinfra is basically pure Python with twist or two.

There have not been any manual permanent configuration entries on the device, and instead whatever is configured there is I have in git on my laptop.

Hardware notes

I have not used the HDMI port beyond the initial text-based installation of Debian from SD card, but as it is normal Intel integrated GPU, it is highly likely to work for normal use cases. Unless I find some cool e-ink HDMI screen (for e.g. status display or home dashboard), I am unlikely to use it, though.

I experienced some issues with some power-saving settings (which was not enabled by default), when I attempted to use suggestions of powertop , and it boiled down to the network ports dying for good if they entered deep enough power saving mode. This unfortunately happened only intermittently and with nontrivial uptime, so it took me some time to figure out that the device itself was fine, but some of the ports definitely were not. (I could connect to it from my WLAN, but not LAN).

After having figured that out, I applied most of the other suggested power saving configs but left the network card on its default settings, and the device has been quite stable from December 2023 onward.

Coming up next..?

Next blog post will go to the details of what, exactly, this new router does. But like its predecessor, it also runs OpenWrt (and many other things).