After some thinking, I’ve decided to buy a Mudi for travel purposes. Previously, I’ve been using a RAVPower RP-WD009, but the lack of OpenWRT, support, and built in 4G was a bit of a deal breaker. I like the idea of having a small portable storage and router that provides a VPN uplink to my home server, though, especially that can sync content with my server for backup purposes.
However after a day of use, I have ran into multiple issues:
- my microSD is not detected at all. It is a 128GB SanDisk Ultra SD card, with MTP partitioning, and a single FAT32 partition. All my other computers, and even the WD009 read it without issue. And by not working I mean there’s no block device, or any indication that an SD card was inserted
- the connection is unstable, I often get dropped off of it, especially if I have an active SSH connection, or am installing OPKG software (either via the Gl.inet admin interface Plugins, or via LuCI, or via terminal)
- mount and share management is atrocious. For a travel router that has been advertised as a file hub, I find it incredibly weird that all shares are automatic, the user has no control over it (unless they go through the trouble of installing LuCI and managing mounts, Samba shares through there), nor is there an interface to browse the files. If this device is to be a storage hub as well, it needs at least a file browser, and a minimal partition/drive/share manager (allow the formatting of a disk, creation of multiple partitions, assigning them to mount points, and creating shares pointing to specific folders, plus share right management).
- AzireVPN login does not work. I made sure to insert the appropriate password, and even tried a token, all resulted in a “username or password invalid” - which is quite unlikely, since I copy-pasted the values from my password manager
- The OLED display always show 3G/4G signal as full, even when the web interface shows a single bar of reception…
- No IPv6 support whatsoever!
- It would be nice to have a sort of SDK, or example, for development-oriented users to create their own gl dashboard views. As it’s been made apparent by the AdguardHome package, third party services can easily integrate, and I for one would love to have a few extra options for open source firmware.
- No data limit visualisation and management on the dashboard (warnings, limits, etc.)
- Quite slow throughputs sometime - especially with VPN, even if uplink is ethernet.
Is this behaviour normal, or is my unit faulty?