PCEngines APUs are great router devices to put whatever you want on, including OpenWRT. Proper Intel NICs (Realtek is not great for routers) for cheap.
I'd also strongly suggest to have router and access points as separate physical devices.
A great step up for someone with an AIO consumer router/WiFi AP would be to get something like that as a router, flash OpenWRT on the old router and transform it into a "dumb" access point.
Thanks for the great writeup. I got to know about a lot of ls** commands that would be useful in future. I built similar with OPNSense using QOTOM Q515G6[1] which looks eerily similar to what you got from AliExpress. So in a way reading your article was more like knowing my own router better. Thanks.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DLYGZG4/
Thanks for writing about it - I was actually close to pulling the trigger on another of their boxes a few moons back, great to hear it's good in practice as well :)
(...Personally I avoid Intel CPUs best I can, though. AMD's ME equivalent on the APU can actually be disabled, which happens to be something I care about for something like router)
Has there actually been any research into the disabling of AMD PSP like there has been surrounding me_cleaner?
All I remember regarding AMD PSP was that one motherboard manufacturer showed the option after an update and the other you had to flash a modified BIOS to expose it.
But besides this discovery by a user, there hadn't been any research or verification that this software option does what it claims.
I am also an owner of these devices. I am not knowledgeable if this is as trivial for AMD CPUs in general, but I know that specifically for the SoC in the APU, since i build my own image anyway, it's a simple configuration flag there:
Thanks for sharing that. It looks quite a bit more powerful than PCEngines APU boards, and cheaper than the Qotom boxes it's imitating. And it's nice to have a detailed review showing it works as expected.
https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm
I'd also strongly suggest to have router and access points as separate physical devices.
A great step up for someone with an AIO consumer router/WiFi AP would be to get something like that as a router, flash OpenWRT on the old router and transform it into a "dumb" access point.