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What is the intended purpose of an openwrt banana pi?

I associate openwrt with router firmware/software, so I would expect a lot of ethernet ports (more than two). Or use it as a wifi router/access point, when I only need one port. If I would want to do any networking tricks, I would fall back to a rpi/banana pi, which wouldn't do routing or wifi.

I'm only curious. I have two rpi's in my drawer doing nothing.




I imagine it’s intended to be combined with an Ethernet switch. One or two (potentially bonded) Ethernet ports can carry a lot of VLANs.


That's how basically all consumer routers work: an SoC with about two Ethernet interfaces, at least one but usually both connected to a managed Ethernet switch chip, using separate VLANs for the WAN and LAN ports. Routing both Ethernet ports through the switch chip is usually done so that the switch can do some NAT offload.


The sort answer: "network services".

Longer answer:

1) providing basic networking (default gateway, connection to upstream provider)

2) basic security: firewalling + natting

3) basic network daemons, and "daemons": DNS, DHCP, IPv6 autoconf, and a nice new one: 802.11s ("network mesh": keep wifi at 5 bars by kicking people off their access point if another access point can provide a better connection)

4) more advanced networking stuff: VPN (l3vpn, l2ptp, l2ptmp, mesh vpn), cloud connections/vpns, WAN connections, redundancy (downstream and upstream, l2 and l3, ...)

5) more advanced security stuff: 802.1x, stateful firewalls, inspecting firewalls, IDS, ...

6) server networking stuff: proxy, reverse proxy, statefull firewalling, load balancing, ...

7) more advanced daemons (on network devices it's mostly proxying for redundancy and/or load balancing): File sharing, SMTP, WebDAV, Active Directory, payment protocols, ...

Now a lot of these OpenWRT can't provide, but you'd be surprised and their support for new things goes up every year.




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