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Comment by InTheArena | Hacker News Reader

I have a Unifi UDMP, which while I think is probably the best prosumer option right now, falls way short due to a PPPoE problem that limits fiber connections to under 500mb/s, and the lack of load balancing across multiple link networks (which I totally admit, is a first world problem).

I am thinking about building my own, but then comes the maintaince of all of the hardware / software. For me that would be fine, but for my family, it would be a total PITA to manage, and any downtime would be horrible.

So, stuck with UDMP for the moment, until they either fix their problems, or alternatively I decide to bite the bullet and build this on top of linux.

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> falls way short due to a PPPoE problem that limits fiber connections to under 500mb/s, and the lack of load balancing across multiple link networks (which I totally admit, is a first world problem).

how are you achieving load balancing? using LACP? not having working LACP seems kind of unacceptable in my opinion for suchs an expensive device.

Also, older enterprise grade routing hardware can be had for very cheap.

It has a failover over the two WAN ports, but no load balancing at all across them.

Can you link or elaborate more on this PPPoE problem? i have a UDMP on the way, and I don't think I'll be affected by it with my simple network design, but also not sure.

PPPoE de-encapuslation is likely not hardware accelerated (or can't be combined with other hardware accelerated packet processing) or if that platform is more PC like than I thought, it may be that the PPPoE de-encapsulation is single threaded either as a missed software feature or because the nic can't separate it into multiple queues.

PPPoE is one of the worst network protocols ever, and there's no reason it should have been implemented on fiber. I don't really understand why it was implemented on DSL either; maybe some bizarro way to try to prevent theft of service?

It's determined by your WAN provider. Centurylink and google, (AFAIK) leverage PPPoE connections, and the network traffic there seems to be limited around 600mb/s.

I replaced the connection with a cable drop, which I get 1.2gb/s down on.

Odroid N2?

Need a lot more power then that to handle 2x 1GB/s connections.

What?

The UDM Pro[0] has a quad-core Cortex A57 CPU running at 1.7GHz, according to the spec sheet I'm looking at right now. It has 4GB of RAM.

The ODROID-N2+[1] has a quad-core Cortex A73 CPU running at 2.4GHz. It also has 4GB of RAM.

The UDM Pro is like half the performance of the ODROID-N2+, accounting for architecture and frequency differences, so... I'm not sure what you're getting at?

The ODROID should be more than enough to handle a gigabit connection if the UDM Pro is even halfway capable of it, from a power perspective. Connecting more ethernet ports to it without an exposed PCIe connector is going to be clunky, but that's not the issue you pointed out.

[0]: https://dl.ubnt.com/ds/udm-pro

[1]: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram-2/

There is far more power in hardware than just the instruction set times the GHZ. Part of the UDM's problem is that there is evidently no offload for needed for PPPoE.

It should also be self-evident, but I also need more the one interface to route traffic to two seperate networks, ignoring that the requirement is actually to load balance multiple systems to a internal 10gb/s network.

The USB is nowhere near what you need to run a 10gb/s or even a 2.5GB/e (based on my experience with other ARM hardware).

No, you really don't. Though the problem in this case is the N2 only has 1 GbE port and adding more through USB, even 3.0, is notoriously bad (regardless of the platform.)

(source: I benchmarked my N2+. It'll route and NAT 1 GBit quite leisurely.)

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