I have a working setup with a wd mynet 750. It keeps us just under our data cap. Because of downlink speeds it can't keep up (I have 700down it can only do 70). Because of this I set up a double NAT which causes issues.I need the quotas mainly for the family. I want to upgrade but I'm afraid of dropping a bunch of money with and ending up back where I started. I tried using x86 but ran into horrid issues. Any suggestions for routers?
The full story:
We have a 1.2tb data cap through our ISP, and after getting an $80 overage fee (which was 2x our current bill at the time) I decided to set up a gargoyle router with quotas for the family who are not so tech inclined to be able to watch their data usage. I got and old router from a friend (WD mynet 750) and we lived happily for a while.
Eventually our ISP upgraded our speed for free and I moved to a higher speed plan and the router wasn't keeping up. currently we have a 700mb/s downlink and the router can only handle 60mb/s when handling quotas. This lead to me setting up a double NAT with a different router so I could enjoy the fast downlink while keeping our data use in check. This has caused a myriad of double NAT issues with our chromecasts, steam link, firestick, ssh, and other related issues that I am getting tired of dealing with. So I decided to upgrade.
My current top level router can only do 300mb/s without hardware offloading which causes me to be wary and skeptical about what replacement might be able to keep up especially with the data quotas. Being on the lowish end of the income scale I don't want to spend $50/mo to get rid of the data cap as that would raise our bill by some
I asked said friend if he had another router I could use and all he could provide was a netgear nighthawk r7000 which is not fully supported by openwrt and doesn't seem to be supported by gargoyle. It is a nice router though so I decided to set it up as an AP with an old Ryzen PC as the gargoyle router. With it's 6 core cpu and 32gb of ram It should have plenty of power.
After fooling around for a few hours due to it not finding my second NIC I got it working. It was beautiful. I could get 600+mb/s over wifi even with quotas, when I hit the quota it throttled beautifully. so I connected it up and promptly started getting nf_conntrack table full errors even after increasing connection limits.I would get errors that say something like error imq failed, trying imq __init__ hooks(). The web interface would slow to a crawl, DNS resolving would stop working on all connected devices and eventually it would stop all traffic.
This happened even after reboots, except it would happen immediately. Re-imaging would let it run fine for a while then it would happen again. I tried 1.12, the ispy 1.13, even custom built the current 1.13 from git as of Sep 1. All yield the same results. My friend is looking for his 1gb usb3 ethernet adapter I thought maybe a raspberry pi would be powerful enough.
I hate bothering people with my own issues and would rather just keep lurking as I have for the past 4-5 but sometimes you have to concede. I don't have the expertise needed for this.
Well, I suppose what I want is a suggestion for a gargoyle-compatible router that can handle the sort of speeds that we have over our network. The x86 pc uses too much power to be a long term solution anyway.
I included the story about the x86 issues as it's probably something that should be fixed. That's if it isn't something that I'm doing wrong.