Multiport Home Router - use case

[miro123]

Hallo,
I'm noob in this forum and subject area. I have one dumb question.
There are many 4 and 6 port single board computers discussed in this forum. There are plenty of chooses in aliexpress.

My question is what is the real use case of such multi-port home router?

I remembered in end of 80's and begin 90's such routers ware popular - switches ware ultra expesive ~1000$/port and VLANs ware not existent.
But today any low/mid range switch offer the most LAN routing features at higher speed and lower cost. e.g. VLAN, L2....L3 filtering, sceduling, load balancing just to name few of them.


Do I miss something?
As already mentioned I'm nob in this area. I did some networs tasks just 30..35 years ago.
Best Regards,
Miro

 

[altmind]

people want to run opn/pf sense, not propietary NOS.

 

[miro123]

I thinks that I did not clearly define my questions.
What can be done with those 4 and 6 MAC boxes that it cannot be done with any general purpose dual port NIC/ motherboard?
What is the purpose of 3-th .....6port in one home network router?

 

[altmind]

what are you probably seeing is not a home network router, these are homelab/enterprise routers.

homes are fine with one-two router-switch-AP combo.

 

[miro123]

Thanks for the fast answer.
1. I consider this devices as entry level consumer boxes. They are far away from enterprise . The resons are listed below
- no ECC RAM
- no customer support
- unclear bios update and secuirty issues
- missing many features marketed under the Intel vPro umpbrela.
- Hw on entry level consumer range - I did not dive deep in HW. There is big deference between dual/redundant power supply enterprice server vs external power adapter offered by those boxes.
2. Home lab - I think is wide understanding. E.g. my home hardware firmware lab is build on dual port router WAN/LAN . The LAN port serve 4 VLANs.

I bought one of those devices for education purpose. I want to teach my son on some network basics. Such box is great education tool

 

[altmind]

if you only knew how many enterprise deployments roll without any vendor support. Especially, if the vendor's support terms, prices and lifecycle is user-hostile(hi, cisco)

and regarding ECC/redundant-psu, from practical experience, the long-term networking hardware failures rarely come from these.

 

[oldpenguin]

@miro123 it all depends on your target deployment and expectations vs what it can do.
Heck, give me a machine with a router role that has 3 copper ports and I'm confident I can invent at least a 20% benefit by using the 3rd port for something that would at least reduce the risk of saturation at whatever times.
Specs on paper are nice, real world scenarios differ - see the usual hipster-hate against entry level machines that use Realtek NICs while happily running with 40% performance numbing e1000 driver on Intel 219 chipsets for years.
What can be done with those 4-6 port devices - on grandma's house, where grandma is totally internet agnostic besides social networks? Hard to say, but what if grandma's house doesn't have an extra managed L2 switch past the 2 port router, but:
- has a CCTV install, cheap version, with chinesium asia-made cameras and recorder that would happily expose themselves and/or their content towards.. somewhere?
- thinks it's trendy to have internet connected modern devices (oh wait, they called them IoT and a lot of them are chinesium asian-made with poor quality control)
- lives remotely, main ISP is cheap but crappy and sometimes has long outages and her phone company gave her a dumb box with a SIM and an ethernet port that could provide internet when needed
- <insert your favorite 100 else scenarios i haven't thought of here>

Morale here being: if today you need to occupy 10 ports in a switch, get at least a 24 port version.

Before someone slaps me, there's another case in here: you get a 6 ethernet port machine, but 5 of the ports are internally bridged through a MII bridge chip and act as a single ethernet (oh, hello fortinet and prolly others, how you guys doin'?), in which scenario I'd happily have a managed switch behind.

PS: I'm still wondering why there are still devices with Celeron/Pentium-type CPUs pretending to be mini-PCs for whatever purpose. The only form factor where those belong shouldn't exceed RaspberryPI form factor. But that's a personal opinion while waiting for an affordable mini-pc/STX form factor with affordable ARM or RISC-V and a PCIe x8 linking a quad sfp+.

 

[sic0048]

My question is what is the real use case of such multi-port home router?

There are two primary uses for all of those ports. One, people use them to create separate network segments. Sure you can do this with VLANs, but there is something to be said about physically isolating networks sometimes. Second, sometimes people will use multiple ports to create a LAG connection to their switches. Think of a LAG connection as a multilane road vs a single lane road with just one connection. The speed limit is the same with both type of roads (max speed of a single object doesn't increase with LAG), but the multilane road allows more objects to travel at the same time without causing a backup.

 

[Becks0815]

My question is what is the real use case of such multi-port home router?

Install Proxmox on the box and use a dedicated port for accessing the Proxmox host. Then install pfsense or opnsense as virtual machine on the box and use two other NICs set to "hardware pass through" as LAN and WAN ports, and already three ports are in use.
Last but not least plug the WiFi AP into the last NIC, so any traffice between WLAN and the rest of the network is forced to go through the firewall and to add a potential additonal layer of safety for your network. Or use the port to build a similar separated network for servers.

 

[miro123]

Thanks for the input. I'm sure I will find use of those extra ports - the problem is that they increase the PCB size. power consumption and price.
My general rule by designing an network is to use devices for their main purpose - lets switches to do the switching LAG and WLANs, QoS etc.. Let the high level staff to the routers, firewalls and server apps.
@Becks0815 - I've never use such separation for WiFi the reasons are
1. I don't separate network based on physical interface - I rather use separation based on user credential/Radius server.Up to date wifi security autentication take care for security
2. Most WIfi AP supports WLANs - the separation is already done on that level- in one cabel is already running many independent user connections
3. I will only use separate port for wifi if port has POE capability , and this is not the case with those boxes.

 

[Becks0815]

If I build something like a DMZ for a public server, I prefer to have all that stuff on a dedicated NIC, instead of using software to separate it from the other computers. But as I don't require such a service, I currently only use 3 ports.

I also tried bare metal FW first, but FreeBSD has issues with the newer chipsets, resulting in hard drive errors and a corrupted installation. With Proxmox in the middle, it runs stable. And now, after some days, I really like the approach. I can e.g. clone the VM, run a software upgrade on the firewall, and if it fails simply revert to the older version. I also can add a virtual NIC to the firewall and link it with another VM running on Proxmox to create dedicated machines running some other relevant services. For me e.g. it is a small Debian Linux system with Wireguard and uptime Kuma (network monitoring) running on it. No need to route all the traffic over the switch or any other hardware, and as long as the router is alive and has internet connection, I can use the WG service with my phone.

PCB size is not an issue with the N100 I use. It is already smaller than a mini ITX and doesn't take up a lot of space.

 

[sic0048]

Thanks for the input. I'm sure I will find use of those extra ports - the problem is that they increase the PCB size. power consumption and price.
My general rule by designing an network is to use devices for their main purpose - lets switches to do the switching LAG and WLANs, QoS etc.. Let the high level staff to the routers, firewalls and server apps.
@Becks0815 - I've never use such separation for WiFi the reasons are
1. I don't separate network based on physical interface - I rather use separation based on user credential/Radius server.Up to date wifi security autentication take care for security
2. Most WIfi AP supports WLANs - the separation is already done on that level- in one cabel is already running many independent user connections
3. I will only use separate port for wifi if port has POE capability , and this is not the case with those boxes.

First, you are clearly not as "noobish" as you first made yourself out to be...
Second, if you don't see the need to extra network ports, then don't get a device with them. Just because someone else thinks a 6 port firewall is appropriate for their use case doesn't mean it has to be what you use.