Nanopi R6S Mini WiFi Router OpenWRT with Three Gbps Ethernet Ports LPDDR4X 8GB RAM Based in 6Tops NPU RK3588S Soc for IOT NAS Smart Home Gateway Support Linux Ubuntu Android (with CNC Metal Case)

I am quite pleased with the NanoPi R6S and I am leaving a 5 star review for several reasons:1. Specs are super. Three ethernet interfaces, two of which support 2.5gb2. I found the FriendlyElec wiki documentation to be quite detailed and easy to follow.3. Nice support for Linux. Debian 11 was my target, but Ubuntu and others are also supported.4. Preconfigured ssh access.5. Open orientation. Full schematics and cad files are published, and the software is open source and published.6. Forum is available for community support.Anyway, after an enjoyable half day of work, I now have a rock solid 2.5gb home gateway running headless Debian on the R6S.

Not supported by OpenWRT. You must use FriendlyWRT and that does not work for Nat loopback or wireguard VPN. There is no support from the manufacturer.

I’ve been using micro computers for running routing software for my router/firewall. A few years go, I switched from pfSense running on the amd64 platform to OpenWRT running on a Raspberry Pi 4B. This worked well until Comcast boosted my tier to 1Gbps for the same price. With Smart Queueing enabled, Raspberry Pi 4B would start choking at about 860 Mbps and would start dropping packets. To be able to route a full 1 GBPs (about 941 Mbps before overhead) without dropping packets, Smart Queueing (SQM) had to be disabled in OpenWRT. So, Raspberry Pi 4B definitely struggles north of 800 Mbps, which is really not a big deal for most people, but for those with Gigabit Internet (at least download bandwidth) and higher, Raspberry Pi 4B has a hardware limitation.Because I like the idea of running a router on ARM hardware, I started looking for a more powerful ARM-based device and found the NanoPi R6S. At the time of this writing (summer 2023), it’s not officially supported by OpenWRT, but the manufacturer (FriendlyElec) maintains its own fork of OpenWRT and has various images published, including those that run on the embedded MMC storage. The instructions on how to install the FriendlyElec image to the MMC storage are in the Wiki on the FriendlyElec site.OpenWRT is a great routing product for home/small business - better than pfSense, as it’s not driver-limited to Gigabit Ethernet, but one of the weak sides of OpenWRT is the difficulty of installing it on micro computers with large storage, as the officially compiled OpenWRT images are not do not take advantage of a larger storage space. This is where the FiendlyElec fork of OpenWRT shines, as it’s compiled to take full advantage of the 32 GB of onboard MMC storage. If OpenWRT were available for this chipset, one would have to manually compile OpenWRT to take full advantage of the 32 GB MMC, as the official image would be compiled for a tiny amount of storage, preventing one from installing additional images.In other words, the installation of the FriendlyWRT software is much more streamlined than the OpenWRT software. Once FriendlyWRT Is installed on the onboard MMC storage, it looks exactly like OpenWRT, behaves like OpenWRT, and even says it’s OpenWRT. The package repository is not the same as used by OpenWRT - it’s the one hosted by FriendlyElec.Some people have security concerns with this OpenWRT fork, as it originates in China. You will have to decide for yourself. Personally, I think the production volume of this device is so low that the Chinese government wouldn’t be interested in forcing FriendlyElec to put a back door into this fork, but no one could tell for sure, of course. Eventually, the official release of OpenWRT will support this device once the OpenWRT project builds its software on Linux kernel 6.X. The ‘23 stable release of OpenWRT (soon to be release as of this writing) is based on Linux kernel 5.15. It may be another year and a half until OpenWRT officially supports this device. Because of the time and effort (not to mention the level of Linux expertise) it usually takes to compile an OpenWRT image for non-embedded devices, I limited the updates of OpenWRT software on the Raspberry Pi to one every two years. Therefore, I might continue using the FriendlyElec’s images even after OpenWRT officially supports this device just to be able to upgrade the software more frequently to eliminate newly discovered vulnerabilities.I’ve actually bought two of these R6S devices to keep one as a cold spare. I can now upgrade the spare to the most recent stable release, restore the backup onto it, and swap out the cold spare for the active router, thus keeping the downtime to about a minute or two and being able to have the most recent software with all vulnerabilities patched up instead of using vulnerable software for long periods of time because compiling OpenWRT for every dot release is a pain and not worth my time.Installing the FrindlyElec image only takes about 20 minutes from the beginning of the download to restoring the current backup, so it’s much more feasible to do this procedure several times per year - as soon as the next stable dot release is published.

I got one as a gift. Works fine after a reboot, and as hours go by the connection starts dropping, link speed goes down to 100mbs, and gets extremely hot. Physical characteristics have not been considered in designing this product. Don't use as a router

Looking at the stats, this is a great piece of gear but you're limited to the manufacturer's disk images for anything you want to use it for. Had serious problems using this as a router with their FriendlyWRT image and I wasn't trying to do anything fancy. Works ok as an AndroidTV device but of course no Widevine/DRM support. Seems to work alright as a Linux desktop computer but I don't know anyone is buying this for that reason.