CWWK/Topton/... Nxxx quad NIC router

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indiekiduk

New Member
Sep 12, 2020
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Can someone give me advise on converting a baremetal opnsense installation to a proxmox installation?

I currently run opnsense baremetal on my N100 and I am beginning to think this was a mistake. I am having problems with ntopng after an update and I am thinking if I could easily roll back with proxmox this wouldn't give me an issue. Also I want to run home assistant on the N100 as well.

If I install proxmox, then install opnsense into proxmox, could I just pass all the ethernet adapters to opnsense then restore my configure and it will work? Or will it be more involving then that?

Can I virutally pass proxmox and home assistant to opnsense as a virtual network adapter?
N100 is overkill for opnsense but nowadays its the same price as the old J processors so might aswell just keep it. Why don't you buy another mini PC for your home assistant? These things are dirt cheap if you keep the Ram/SSD to minimum needed.
 

mjtimmer

New Member
Sep 21, 2023
9
10
3
N100 is overkill for opnsense but nowadays its the same price as the old J processors so might aswell just keep it. Why don't you buy another mini PC for your home assistant? These things are dirt cheap if you keep the Ram/SSD to minimum needed.
Idd overkill, that’s why it’s perfect to run in a vm so you can use the same platform for a couple of other vm’s as well, plus the added benefit of really easy backups (just snapshot/copy the entire vm). Add one or two other n100/n305’s and you can create a proxmox high availability cluster so you’re vm’s are always available :)
 

metlrise

New Member
Nov 17, 2021
15
16
3
Can someone give me advise on converting a baremetal opnsense installation to a proxmox installation?

I currently run opnsense baremetal on my N100 and I am beginning to think this was a mistake. I am having problems with ntopng after an update and I am thinking if I could easily roll back with proxmox this wouldn't give me an issue. Also I want to run home assistant on the N100 as well.

If I install proxmox, then install opnsense into proxmox, could I just pass all the ethernet adapters to opnsense then restore my configure and it will work? Or will it be more involving then that?

Can I virutally pass proxmox and home assistant to opnsense as a virtual network adapter?
Try this tutorial, its for pfsense but it should work also for OPNsense

 
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alaricljs

Active Member
Jun 16, 2023
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If I install proxmox, then install opnsense into proxmox, could I just pass all the ethernet adapters to opnsense then restore my configure and it will work? Or will it be more involving then that?
Just recently did similar. You have to assign the differently named HW interfaces (igb0...) to the correctly purposed named interface (WAN...). The only complication I ran into was my OCD needing to rebuild the vlan interfaces so that they would be named appropriately since you cannot change the name while the interface is assigned to something.

The firewall rules all carry over correctly since they are attached to the network "purpose" rather than the hardware name.
 
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demium

New Member
Nov 10, 2023
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Hi all,

Is there any interesting voucher or discount around N305 unit in cwwk.net? The only discount that I could see so far is the usual 5USD OFF voucher, but a part of this, nothing else has been changed so far.

Thanks
 

morkyks

New Member
Nov 24, 2023
1
1
3
Hey guys anyone have any thoughts on this box? Looking to get something for an OPNsense box with plans to also enable Intrusion detection.

G30M Alder Lake N100 Soft Router DDR5 SSD 4*2.5G LAN i226 HD DP Dual Display Mini PC pfSense Firewall Appliance ESXI AES-NI

I've seen it in a few different listings like the following:

Ali Ex listing 1
Ali Ex listing 2

Case is quite different than the ones from topton but it's also quite cheaper (for me) at about £100-115

There's also this one which also has a different case and probably different mobo judging from the ports but is around the same price.

Ali Ex listing 3

Any thoughts on any of the above? I'm not crazy worried about temps as I can always just stick a fan on it. I much more interested in the much lower prices as this could potentially mean that I avoid any custom duties in the UK as it's below the £135 threshold from what I understand. So as long as it works and performs I'd be happy.
 
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MemeScreen

New Member
Oct 14, 2023
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Hey guys anyone have any thoughts on this box? Looking to get something for an OPNsense box with plans to also enable Intrusion detection.

G30M Alder Lake N100 Soft Router DDR5 SSD 4*2.5G LAN i226 HD DP Dual Display Mini PC pfSense Firewall Appliance ESXI AES-NI

I've seen it in a few different listings like the following:

Ali Ex listing 1
Ali Ex listing 2

Case is quite different than the ones from topton but it's also quite cheaper (for me) at about £100-115

There's also this one which also has a different case and probably different mobo judging from the ports but is around the same price.

Ali Ex listing 3

Any thoughts on any of the above? I'm not crazy worried about temps as I can always just stick a fan on it. I much more interested in the much lower prices as this could potentially mean that I avoid any custom duties in the UK as it's below the £135 threshold from what I understand. So as long as it works and performs I'd be happy.
Im interested in these as well. Also Topton has a similar product to the Ali Ex listing 3 you posted, it also has a console port.

 

greenkiwi

New Member
Nov 12, 2023
13
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I'm guessing the cooling is Ok for the N100 on those cases? The fins aren't quite as big. But probably super low wattage.
 

tibbe

New Member
Mar 17, 2022
24
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Got the CWWK N305 unit with the 4x NVMe expander board. Happy with it so far. runs relatively cool after repasting (40C lightly loaded).

I tried to follow the optimized BIOS options posted way back in this thread but the BIOS menus for the 4x NVMe BIOS looks a bit different. My PassMark scores:

Code:
                   PassMark PerformanceTest Linux (11.0.1002)


Intel Core i3-N305 (x86_64)
8 cores @ 3800 MHz  |  31.1 GiB RAM
Number of Processes: 8  |  Test Iterations: 1  |  Test Duration: Medium
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU Mark:                          6893
  Integer Math                     29869 Million Operations/s
  Floating Point Math              18104 Million Operations/s
  Prime Numbers                    11.0 Million Primes/s
  Sorting                          10419 Thousand Strings/s
  Encryption                       6823 MB/s
  Compression                      81701 KB/s
  CPU Single Threaded              2261 Million Operations/s
  Physics                          267 Frames/s
  Extended Instructions (SSE)      3690 Million Matrices/s

Memory Mark:                       2508
  Database Operations              2504 Thousand Operations/s
  Memory Read Cached               20558 MB/s
  Memory Read Uncached             12036 MB/s
  Memory Write                     9681 MB/s
  Available RAM                    18597 Megabytes
  Memory Latency                   26 Nanoseconds
  Memory Threaded                  15840 MB/s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've attached some screenshots from BIOS. Could someone guide me to some reasonable performance settings?
 

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Becks0815

Well-Known Member
Oct 15, 2022
219
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Can someone give me advise on converting a baremetal opnsense installation to a proxmox installation?
When I got the N100, Proxmox was the only option to run opnsense. I wanted to set it up baremetal, but this failed due to issues with the NVME driver. And now I don't want to go back to bare metal.

Opnsense sometimes has problems with Wireguard. Some of the versions/updates weren't really stable. Because of this, I ran a WG service on the NA. with port forwarding on opnsense. With the possibility of having virtual machines on the same N100 when running Proxmox, I moved this plus some more things (jdownloader, a simple webserver to provide internal files like a .zshrc and all the ssl certificates) to the same physical box, eliminating possible network disruption or hickups. And despite running 3 other VMs, I still have enough capacity to add more, in case I want to push more things to theis box.

the only detail I would change now is to order 32GB instead of 16GB and a 2TB or even 4TB instead of 1TB NVME drive.
 

buz

New Member
Nov 5, 2023
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Idd overkill, that’s why it’s perfect to run in a vm so you can use the same platform for a couple of other vm’s as well, plus the added benefit of really easy backups (just snapshot/copy the entire vm). Add one or two other n100/n305’s and you can create a proxmox high availability cluster so you’re vm’s are always available :)
Unless you have two or more uplinks to different ISPs there will always be a single point of failure, so what's the point...
 

kliguin

Member
Nov 22, 2022
59
40
18
$ lsusb -tv

View attachment 32720


I have a bog-standard USB3.0 thumb attached to one SS port, and a Vantec NST-205C3-SG (with a 256GB Inland Premium PCIe3 x4 m.2) attached to the other SS port. I am currently booted-into a Void Linux install on one partition of the the Inland/Vantec.

btw, I also don't receive delivery of *all* watched forum thread updates.


Got mine HUNSN RJ35 N305 new motherboard CW-AL-4L-V2.0

Slightly orderd different but is shows also
Code:
20000M/x2

Usb 3.1 gen 2 (SuperSpeed usb 10Gbit/s)
Usb 3.2 (SuperSpeed usb 20Gbit/s)

Code:
root@pve2:~# lsusb -tv
/:  Bus 04.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/4p, 10000M
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
/:  Bus 03.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/12p, 480M
    ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
    |__ Port 6: Dev 2, If 0, Class=Hub, Driver=hub/4p, 480M
        ID 067b:2586 Prolific Technology, Inc.
    |__ Port 7: Dev 3, If 0, Class=Mass Storage, Driver=usb-storage, 480M
        ID 05e3:0751 Genesys Logic, Inc. microSD Card Reader
/:  Bus 02.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/2p, 20000M/x2
    ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
/:  Bus 01.Port 1: Dev 1, Class=root_hub, Driver=xhci_hcd/1p, 480M
    ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
 
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buz

New Member
Nov 5, 2023
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I think that's what the chipset could do, it's fairly unlikely it has enough uplink to actually achieve 20gbits, no?
 

kliguin

Member
Nov 22, 2022
59
40
18
I think that's what the chipset could do, it's fairly unlikely it has enough uplink to actually achieve 20gbits, no?
Well I don't know that, at least the chipset is 3.2 capable. How can we check how many PCIe lanes it got connected to?
 

MBehr

New Member
Sep 4, 2023
15
6
3
Got the CWWK N305 unit with the 4x NVMe expander board. Happy with it so far. runs relatively cool after repasting (40C lightly loaded).

I tried to follow the optimized BIOS options posted way back in this thread but the BIOS menus for the 4x NVMe BIOS looks a bit different. My PassMark scores:

Code:
                   PassMark PerformanceTest Linux (11.0.1002)


Intel Core i3-N305 (x86_64)
8 cores @ 3800 MHz  |  31.1 GiB RAM
Number of Processes: 8  |  Test Iterations: 1  |  Test Duration: Medium
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU Mark:                          6893
  Integer Math                     29869 Million Operations/s
  Floating Point Math              18104 Million Operations/s
  Prime Numbers                    11.0 Million Primes/s
  Sorting                          10419 Thousand Strings/s
  Encryption                       6823 MB/s
  Compression                      81701 KB/s
  CPU Single Threaded              2261 Million Operations/s
  Physics                          267 Frames/s
  Extended Instructions (SSE)      3690 Million Matrices/s

Memory Mark:                       2508
  Database Operations              2504 Thousand Operations/s
  Memory Read Cached               20558 MB/s
  Memory Read Uncached             12036 MB/s
  Memory Write                     9681 MB/s
  Available RAM                    18597 Megabytes
  Memory Latency                   26 Nanoseconds
  Memory Threaded                  15840 MB/s
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've attached some screenshots from BIOS. Could someone guide me to some reasonable performance settings?
Can you post the BIOS Home Screen and all the top level BIOS screens after it...I wonder if this BIOS is available from CWWk's support site. How do you run PassMark? I've been using s-tui.
 

MemeScreen

New Member
Oct 14, 2023
9
0
1
I was not able to get a clear response from the tool:
[root@localhost-live intelmetool]# /intelmetool -b
Can't find ME PCI device
Can't find ME PCI device

If it is of any use, this is what appears in the BIOS
Brand stringIntel(R) Core (TM)
I3-N305
VMXSupported
SMX/TXTNot Supported
TXT Crash Code0x00000000
TXT SPAD0x0000000000000000
Boot Guard Status0x00000000
Boot Guard ACM Policy Status0x0000000000000000
Boot Guard SACM Information0x0000007000000000
Again thanks. I think I found a way to check for more recent chips. The program is cbmem. I got instructions for how to run it on the starlabs website.

To install it you
Bash:
git clone https://github.com/coreboot/coreboot.git
cd coreboot/util/cbmem
make
chmod +x cbmem
You can then run the below command to print out the relevant parts of the debug log:
sudo ./cbmem -1 | grep ME

The bit we're looking for is the Operation Mode of the CSME, where 0 is Normal or On, and 3 is disabled.

That should hopefully work.
 

Stovar

Active Member
Dec 27, 2022
174
74
28
Hey guys anyone have any thoughts on this box? Looking to get something for an OPNsense box with plans to also enable Intrusion detection.

G30M Alder Lake N100 Soft Router DDR5 SSD 4*2.5G LAN i226 HD DP Dual Display Mini PC pfSense Firewall Appliance ESXI AES-NI

I've seen it in a few different listings like the following:

Ali Ex listing 1
Ali Ex listing 2

Case is quite different than the ones from topton but it's also quite cheaper (for me) at about £100-115

There's also this one which also has a different case and probably different mobo judging from the ports but is around the same price.

Ali Ex listing 3

Any thoughts on any of the above? I'm not crazy worried about temps as I can always just stick a fan on it. I much more interested in the much lower prices as this could potentially mean that I avoid any custom duties in the UK as it's below the £135 threshold from what I understand. So as long as it works and performs I'd be happy.
Im interested in these as well. Also Topton has a similar product to the Ali Ex listing 3 you posted, it also has a console port.


Was not aware of that £135 threshold custom duties rule, I got my cwwk N5105 6 port from Netherlands and was hit with a custom duty, think it was around 60 quid off top of my head so was not nice.

Good to know next time!

Be careful when selecting any of these mini router pcs, the pictures sometimes says N100 and £93 but make sure you actually check and click the correct CPU underneath the pictures, for example some of those links say N100 but its actually an N5105.

Speaking of N5105 and N100, if its just lightweight work like router duties etc then id say go for the N5105 its still sold and decent but naturally if the price difference is only £20-30 and you can afford it the N100 is newer and better performance.

My N5105 hits around 800-900Mbps while under openwrt Wireguard VPN on an 1gig bb line, but this is with an PC with 1gig Ethernet nic and while under a VPN provider.
 

Stovar

Active Member
Dec 27, 2022
174
74
28
Going OT here, anyone had a chance to see the new Intel Meteor Lake cpus?

Some good YT vids here and here

Trying to make head and tails of it, but it sounds to me at least like intel are really pushing the boat out with power efficiency here.

Asus PN65 mini pc will support Meteor lake, it would be great if Cwwk and Topton and other players also look at Meteor Lake too.

Some of the things mentioned in that video are wacky though, some E-sport games running off 1watt of power and they discuss how the main CPU core can power down and chill while playing back a Video file even.

These might sound perfect for mini pcs as routers and replacement bulky PCs even, but naturally lets see the reviews.