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EdgeRouter Lite OpenWRT

2021-10-04

I set up the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite I scored second-hand on eBay for pretty cheap as home router, to replace the EdgeRouter X I'd had doing the job but borrowed from its permanent home.

I got the Lite because it actually has a USB flash drive internally with the storage on it -- so putting OpenWRT on it is ridiculously easy. Just copy the new kernel and squashfs over to the existing partitions, and boot!

It was a little more complicated in practice as I was editing the drive from my new Alpine machine and needed to install various `dosfs` tools, repartition and mkfs. But it all took a very short time and was no more technically complex than removing 3 screws and unplugging the internal USB flash drive. I sure wish this was still a common method for storing boot disks on consumer devices, not just pro-IT ones! Lots of big fancy switches all have CompactFlash cards with their boot file. But it's a victim of BOM optimisation.

OpenWRT worked great from the gate at setting up PPPoE and VLAN to my VDSL modem, obtaining IPv4 & v6 addresses, and delegating v6 prefix correctly. All told maybe an hour of server downtime while I got my firewall rules set up, compared to days of fucking around to get proper IPv6 on EdgeOS. Very happy with it.

I initially played around with trying to get a DMZ working but realised it didn't really match the actual use case of my NAS which has plenty of connections to/from the LAN as well as the WAN, so can't really be effectively isolated.

I did add a link from the second NIC on the NAS to the spare Ethernet on the router, and set it up as a bonded interface, so A) if the switch goes down, the server will remain accessible to the WAN, and B) I can reach 2Gbps transfer speed into the LAN.