Initial Test Observations

ckuethe · 2022-05-17T04:20:34.668Z

It’s Big. Well, bigger than a Mango, but that’s no surprise.

The QR code for wifi setup worked on my phone.

Automatic firmware update from 4.0.0b3 didn’t work. I tried refreshing a few times but no new firmware was detected. Downloading the firmware and applying it manually worked. Will there be a 4.0.0b5 just to check that the updater works?

Power usage. I was kind of scared by the power adapter it came with, but so far it’ll run from my Anker battery brick, and I can charge my cell phone while tethering which is nice. Seems to idle at about 0.91A, and when tethering a phone goes up to 1.5A. It’ll be interesting to see how high that goes when I start file sharing from it. I’m a little bit worried about the heat. I usually leave my Mango in a little zippered pouch in my bag which has no airflow. I can certainly put a datalogger in there to see how hot it gets, but is there a safety shutoff to prevent catastrophic overheating?

Later this week I’ll have a chance to test at my office which has pretty crazy wireless, as well as one or two airports. If someone is in Washington, you should try the wifi at DCA. They might be doing some band steering but my Mango doesn’t work there. Works fine at IAD.

I need to do some more playing around with AdGuardHome, but I’m a bit confused about how it interacts with the DNS override for all clients setting. My expectation is that when adguard is running it would do DNS hijacking to protect all wireless clients - the stock DNS control said that AdGuard was controlling DNS and it couldn’t change the dns override setting. Time to fire up tcpdump and see what’s actually going on.

Speaking of adding software, I note that some of the opkg sources don’t yet exist. I tried adding the zram-swap package, which depends on kmod-zram, and there is no compatible module for that. Not sure if that will be provided by gl-inet or by openwrt. I know, I don’t really need zram on a router with this much memory, but it’s part of my standard ckuethe-izing (along with adding my ssh keys, installing some other stuff)… Who knows what packages other users assume are available.

Was pleased to see that firmware 4.0 supports ed25519 SSH keys, and that there is no longer a 920K MAC database in /etc - I guess I need to update my script to adjust that bit of cleanup.

For some reason the Slate does not successfully negotiate wireguard with my OpnSense firewall. I see the session initiation leaving the Slate, arriving at my firewall, a response comes back to Slate … and no connection. I probably did something wrong, so I’ll reuse my Mangos wireguard configuration and see if that works…

I took a bunch of other boring measurements: openssl speed, ssh speed, plaintext wifi transfer rate, range (got 500ft in open air) … need to go find a few long patch cables to better test wired performance too.

I’m glad I get to beat up on this thing and help get it to a state where I’d be excited to buy it retail.

alzhao · 2022-05-17T06:44:05.616Z

Pls download beta8 and upgrade manually GL.iNet download center

It comes with 5V4A adapter because it needs to consider when you connect USB devices it will consume more power. Otherwise 3A should work. Even 2A may be OK.

Adguard home, when turned on, the router will forward DNS request to Adguard Home, but the client does not know this directly.

About software package, if there is any missing, we can add it later.

Pls test more about wiregaurd. Must make it work with OpenSense.

ckuethe · 2022-05-18T21:14:26.107Z

Yes, I’ll do some additional work this evening to figure out how to make Slate to talk to my OpnSense firewall since that’s one of my key use cases.

Thanks for considering that people might plug in high power USB devices. That’s a really good decision. It does seem to be working well when I try power my phone while tethering.

ckuethe · 2022-05-19T05:53:17.707Z

Wireguard works with 4.0.0b8, though I did have some problems tethering with my phone this evening. Probably my carrier is doing something dumb.

On that note, the internet connection not available message is a bit annoying: I had an IP, GW, and DNS from my phone, so it wasn’t clear why the VPN panel was saying that internet was not available. By all indications it should have been. Eventually I was able to install tcpdump to figure out where packets were being lost.

As for packages, I just had to add src/gz openwrt_base https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/21.02-SNAPSHOT/packages/arm_cortex-a7/base to /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf and more packages were available.

alzhao · 2022-05-19T09:29:27.244Z

ckuethe:

On that note, the internet connection not available message is a bit annoying:

You are correct about this.