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Comment by justinsb | Hacker News Reader

Dual gigabit, wi-fi and the ability to run Ubuntu makes this very interesting for a "home router / hub" type device. Video output makes it interesting for a media player device. Putting both in one low-powered box is awesome...

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> Dual gigabit, wi-fi and the ability to run Ubuntu makes this very interesting for a "home router / hub" type device.

For that type of appliance, I'd rather have OpenWRT than Ubuntu. Comes pre-fit to the job at hand. And with a reasonable secure configuration by default, as opposed to whatever the thing you've hacked together yourself accidentally leaves open.

That said: Having medium-powered, cheap, compact and appliance-like general purpose computing available is certainly a nice change.

Big computers with lots of cores and gigahertz gets boring pretty quickly. These kinds of things sort of takes computing a bit more back to its roots.

I was thinking the same thing. I'm guessing though that it wouldn't be too hard to put OpenWRT on the box?

Or any other Linux firewall (IPCop, Smoothwall, Untangle...) for that matter.

No thanks, OpenWRT package management is awful. None of the advantages of OpenWRT apply to a machine that has enough resources to run a typical distribution.

What exactly makes `opkg` awful?

Sure, it's no aptitude or pacman, but you have to remember that OpenWRT is a full fledged distribution (package manager and all) that fits on an image of less than 4MB!

opkg upgrade can brick your device.

>Sure, it's no aptitude or pacman, but you have to remember that OpenWRT is a full fledged distribution (package manager and all) that fits on an image of less than 4MB!

It's nice when resources are a limitation. But that's not the case here.

I ran 'opkg upgrade' once and it deleted itself.

I've run into lots of other annoyances with it (e.g. its database is rather slow), but that's the one that sticks in my memory.

I asked myself why I was toying around with OpenWRT and DD-WRT when my N66U router can easily run Debian with a 600 MHz MIPS CPU and 256 MB of RAM! Why suffer the pain of a half-Debian when I can have FULL Debian?

I have a Bus Pirate wired up to the router's UART and a JTAG adapter attached to the JTAG port. Now if only I could get the CFE bootloader to talk to my PC so I can boot the kernel over TFTP and run debian installer or a debootstrapped rootfs. =( I can't even get ping!

EDIT: This is the basic path that I am taking: http://people.zoy.org/~walken/wgt634u/HOWTO.html

Says you should plug tftp into wan but doesn't mention you should use cross-over cable in that case.

It's very unusual that you need to use cross-over cables these days, almost everything is autodetecting.

Only GigE autodetects, and the NIC in his system is unknown.

You've got that slightly backwards. GigE always has auto-MDIX support, slower Ethernet ports might not support it but generally do in all semi-modern hardware.

Really? Didn't know that. Still might be worth a shot in my eyes since it's unclear to me if autodetect happens before or after an OS bootup.

I seem to recall trying both WAN and LAN ports but I will check again this evening. Thanks for the suggestion!

pfsense is basically designed to take a computer and turn it into a high quality router. Very impressive, I recommend you check it out if you get the chance.

Sadly it doesn't have any arm support whatsoever which is extremely disappointing.

> I'd rather have OpenWRT than Ubuntu.

That pretty much guarantees you've never looked into pfSense [1]

[1] http://pfsense.com

While that looks a bit more sophisticated than my current setup, it wont fit nor run on my actual router. And to me, that's a deal-breaker.

I like having my setup sub-divided into separate things, in small, dedicated boxes. I don't want to have to run a PC as router in my otherwise neat and tidy home.

I used to do that, mind you, but I don't feel like going back to that anytime soon.

> I don't want to have to run a PC as router in my otherwise neat and tidy home.

Oh, you mean like one of these things? http://itzr.en.alibaba.com/product/520930686-50069247/Firewa...

yeah, I bet it's really rough to find space in your house for that. it's a shame, too; I got a quote for $45 each in lots of 20 on that unit. I can easily sell them for triple that price, with pfsense installed, and a cheap plastic housing.

openwrt is nice but if you're able to run a full stack then why not?

besides, you could potentially run openwrt on this too anyways...

The PogoPlug also meets these specs for $20. Even though it has these specs it never reaches close to full speed. I suspect this could hold true for this pc as well.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5240/pogoplug-series-4-introdu...

$20?

I can't find that price point anywhere. Was that a typo or am I not looking in the right place?

http://pogoplug.com/devices#pick

the official pogoplug site reports 99$ for Amazon but if you search you'll see 39$: http://www.amazon.com/Pogoplug-Series-Backup-Device-Version/...

This one is 18$ http://www.amazon.com/Pogoplug-Backup-and-Sharing-Device/dp/... but it looks like the first device of the list without sata and usb3 (still good for doing some small hack[1]

Some years ago I bought a Seagate Dockstar (that was derived from the first pogoplug imho) for around 30-40$ (the street price was 80-100) and I'm still using it with Debian (nothing too fancy, just samba, transmission bt client and minidlna)

[1] NB according to this blog post http://fortysomethinggeek.blogspot.com/2013/03/pogoplug-seri... che old versions had better specs (this pogoplug has 800mhz cpu and 128mb ram, the old one was 1.2ghz like my dockstar)

Thanks!

It's a pity Amazon USA doesn't ship electronics to Spain (and while Amazon UK does, the price is much higher). I'll search the 2nd hand market, because it looks like a really great device for that price for little hacks and such :)

I was referring to ebay prices.

If you plan on buying do a little research on the best performing one.

http://fortysomethinggeek.blogspot.com/2013/03/pogoplug-seri...

This Seagate is quite cheap (24 pound) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-STAK200-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Sha... and it seems to be hackable too even though, according to this article[1] , you can't simply enable ssh (you need a serial connection[2], I think I bought one of this cable for a couple of euros from some chinese site, but I've never used it, it was just as a "brick" insurance for my dockstar :-))

NB of course a raspberry pi is always a great solution for its price

[1]http://v2.blogdoch.net/2012/08/19/wusel-080047/ [2]http://www.varkey.in/2011/06/seagate-goflex-net-serial-conne...

The problem with pi is USB2.0 with 100M NIC located on USB hub. It's a bottleneck for filesharing throughput. So far there's been no good device that offers USB 3.0 with gigabit ethernet. Even the Pogoplug doesn't count because it has bottlenecks elsewhere.

As an "all-in-one" this looks appealing (although the Wandboard Quad is still probably a better deal once you factor in all the additional charges that CompuLab tends to add). If you're looking at something specifically for networking/routing, it might be worth noting that other i.MX6 boards have had GigE performance issues: http://boundarydevices.com/i-mx6-ethernet/

My understanding is that it's not a board issue but rather a flaw in the i.MX6 silicon that would affect any board using it. Freescale claim that it just limits the data rate achievable from the built-in Ethernet, but my experience is that the i.MX6 gets a lot of Ethernet overruns even at much lower data rates, resulting in packet loss and unreliable Ethernet. TCP often works around it but UDP/connectionless protocols are thoroughly broken on this SoC.

I would think twice before using the i.MX6 as a router. A laptop maybe, but not something for which you require/expect reliable network links.

Agreed that these are pretty low-level issues - even testing w/ a separate PCIe controller didn't help much. For routing and hackability I'd go w/ a Mikrotik RouterBoard, or for pure price/performance (and a really polished UI), I'd go w/ Ubiquiti's Edge Routers.

For video this doesn't really work. I tried a bunch of ARM devices to use as my HTPC. Problem is video codecs are not optimized for ARM. I think ARM devices are good enough for 6Mbps videos but software is not there yet.

If the GPU can do the decoding, or it has a separate decoder chip, then it will cope just fine regardless of the CPU.

I'm using my Raspberry Pi for showing full HD video on my TV and the files are on my iMac which is connected with the 10/100 Ethernet controller. I have not had any problems watching movies on my TV. Or is it something else you're talking about?

If decoding happens in your Mac (PLEX) then Raspberry doesn't really do anything. Raspberry can not decode a Loseless REMUX MKV from Blu-Ray in my experience. Maybe GPU can help, but I have not seen any ARM board with decent GPU like Nvidia ION.

The GPU in the RasPi is very good. In fact, the system should properly be viewed as a GPU with a CPU grafted onto it. It's common for 1080p24 H.264 to be decoded on it, and there are options to license MPEG2 and VC-1 accelerated decoding as well.

Too bad MPEG-2 licence on the rPi doesn't make it (yet) easily play DVD.

Has anyone tried to do a timing attack on the MPEG-2 decoder license check? Is the check done in HW or a software-based hardware abstraction library?

The Pi is an interesting system in that it has a truly impressive GPU (according to the manufacturers "capable of BluRay quality playback"), especially compared to its bottom-shelf CPU. Which means you need everything encoded in h.264 or some other format the GPU can do, but that's achievable.

Xvid and Divx play nice but I have had problems with Theora.

I have yet to have any issues streaming video to my rPi using OpenELEC [1]. OpenELEC is an embedded linux distribution to run XBMC and has a build optimized for the rPi specifically. The rPi can be a little laggy in the menus at times, but I haven't experienced issues with playback.

[1] http://openelec.tv

I've been running Freescale's OMX video codecs (via Android) on this iMX6 architecture and it's working great. It's all hardware/GPU based and a typical h.264 stream @ 720p doesn't take more than 3-5% CPU.

typical yes, but if you get something that actually uses the software decoder because the hardware decoder doesn't support it, you'll peak to 100% cpu and choppy playback.

You didn't think the software decoder takes 5% cpu did you ? :)

It's not really that that useful to talk about "ARM devices" as a class as they vary wildly in capabilities and this will lead you to make very misinformed, or in this case, totally wrong statements.

The i.MX6 has a VPU that supports h.264 1080p60 decode and 1080p30 BP encode. For more information about the VPU you can mouse over the block diagram: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?co... or you may want to review the i.MX6 GStreamer docs as well: https://community.freescale.com/docs/DOC-93387

Does the specs look like it could read any video file without lag or stuttering?

I have a Chinese Android TV box (RK3066) and video playback for 1080p files is not perfect.

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