Hmm… I somewhat excepted that setup but it was worth a shot.
Cabled wan sould defintely work but are you sure it’s the cabled part causing issues? If you temporarily disable wifi does it still reboot using 6.X?
Why would you need 2x PCIe x4? 1x PCIe 1.0 doesn’t bottleneck 1G/1G
I haven’t tried disabling wifi, didn’t see how or why would that help with wan. I did try my regular PPPoE and also DHCP on my tether phone, neither of it worked. On 5.4.4, both DHCP on tether phone and regular PPPoE work just fine.
Not for bandwidth, just for using 2 seperate NIC when I’ll need it[either as replacement or expansion]. Hence for my initial choice for that ASUS PRIME Z690-P. Among others, I plan a flash-based NAS next year[hopefully]
This is pretty good
I suspect that you might experience driver crash(es) which can cause issues that you’re seeing despite not directly handling ethernet. You should see PPPoE issues by looking at the system log, you might also be able to catch crashing in kernel log (or whatever TurrisOS calls it) but it’s a matter of timing if it affects ethernet unless you have console access since there’s no video output.
You can get dual port or even quad port NICs so no need for another port (check compatibility first before getting a NIC) if you’re getting the RockPro64.
Do you mean this compatibility list? ROCKPro64 Hardware Accessory Compatibility - PINE64
Quite limiting options[unless I’m missing something]
Because of its secure-by-default approach mostly, it serves as a good blank canvas with very little things to screw. Also has very good documentation and good examples in the man pages.
For a PPPoE, you can use ifconfig:
https://man.openbsd.org/pppoe.4
https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq6.html#PPP
But anyway, this is just my bias. It’s not beginner friendly and involves reading the manual a lot, with not easy examples online to guide you (well, mostly because the man pages are better than the ones for Linux, so most users don’t have to ask questions).
Look for second hand HPE Intel quad gigabit port, those things are really abundant in Eastern Europe, should be easy to find around you too. I bought one for 28 euros a few years ago and worked flawlessly until today (and still keeps on working). I believe it was a HPE i340-T4 or something like that (at least I see i340 in dmesg in pfsense).
I have a RockPro64 2GB version as my router and another 4GB version running FreeBSD (for native, no-hassle ZFS) that will soon be a NAS (after I finish with the wiring, I went the route to do my own cabling for the drives, as I didn’t feel like trusting the 12v to 5v converters provided by Pine64 with the official case, which btw, ain’t that great, I can expand if anyone wants to hear).
Again, you can’t go wrong if you go with something akin to the Asrock J3455M.
Holly water! Welcome back! 
The official parts list isn’t full, those were just the things that were tested on it. Besides, the list is mostly for Linux, if you check the FreeBSD driver list, you will know if things will work on not. And just because they don’t out of the box, a fix should be pretty easy to get (I had to add a driver from github on my router for the Realtek 88x2bu WiFi 5 USB dongle (I bought it because it was supposed to be the only one compatible with Android, so I thought it should run on Linux OOTB, but it wasn’t that hard to make it work, just too bad I couldn’t use a BSD because of it).
For me, I just yolo’ed it and went with a rando 6-port SATA card from StarTech, which worked ok (I forgot the chipset, but SATA usually just works - except the official RockPro64’s SATA card, which, at least back when I looked at it, used to not work with the RockPro64 at all, no matter what Linux distro you used, not sure about it now). I’m planning to test that i225 from qnap (the 2-port one) when I get the chance. For now, 1 Gbps was more than enough for me (and I have the built-in realtek on the rkpr64 split in 5 vlans, although right now, there’s not a lot of activity on the other 4).
…or arm/RockChip - FreeBSD Wiki (there is no “ultimate” list)
I will however tell you right now that there isn’t going to be a simple WebUi if you go for a regular OS and you are expected to read documentation.
A3720 CPU random crashes (#372) · Issues · Turris / Turris OS / Turris Build · GitLab sounds like your issue?
@ThatGuyB and @diizzy Thanks for the recommendations. Haven’t found a quad i340 here yet but I did find the Asrock J3455M, which I find appealing. Even have some leftover DDR3, so this looks very viable to me. My main concern currently is PPPoE performance. If I can’t match OpenWrt then there is not much point in using it, at least not standalone.
@diizzy Turris sidetopic: Might be, haven’t noticed a behaviour like that in my case. But I was angry and stressed, it’s possible that is it. But I’m not willing to play with that anymore. I need it to work currently, as i have no replacement [hence why I even made this thread]. The way its described might not be it, as one user says downgrading to HBS from HBK solved it and using the 512MB version helped as well for them but that wasn’t the case for me, as I was and still are on HBS with 512MB.
I have a PCEngines APU2C2. Its a 4 core geode processor with AES-NI, 3 Intel gigabit NICs and sockets for stuff like wifi cards and LTE adapters. Can boot from SD card and MSata. Doesn’t have a GPU and management must be done through serial. It tops 12W maximum and the aluminum case is the heatsink. Might be quite outdated but its built for this job. I heard those are pretty much unobtanium nowadays.
I’m currently using an UDM “trashcan” model. Mostly silent but the fan sometimes ramps when using torrents or too much stuff being sent from rclone to my backup box at hetzner.
Why not get one of these?
They work great, used one for years at my work and never had a single hiccup. They are also very small, passive cooled, low power but high performance, and cheap. You can also install OpenWRT on it if you desire to:
Though I would recommend Untangle, OPNsense, or PFsense instead as they are superior to OpenWRT IMO.
That’s very interesting. I think this might be it. It basically fits my needs perfectly and is waaaaaaay more compact than what I wanted to do. Thank you!
As I’ve said, PfSense/OPNSense and other Free/OpenBSD are not going to be very viable to me, other than experimentation, for their poor PPPoE performance. I might try Untangle.
I would have recommended a ProtectLi, but I know devices like these are harder to get in Europe, at least in the Eastern parts. It is however pricier than a build around the J3455M.
I don’t remember why I avoided this, I must have had a reason for not trying or recommending it. I would stick to OpenWRT x86 or VyOS. Well, my preference is just a generic Linux distro set as a router, which Alpine does great and runs from RAM (in its diskless install), if I cannot run *BSD.
Gigabit
PPPoE is very single threaded - sadly it means it requires a fast core.
Either:
Intel 12100 sounds good, but for a router I’d pair it with a B660
or
AMD 5500 on an A520
would work fine for routing and basic home server-ish stuff you’d want to run on the side.
For networking stick to the onboard nic + cheap additional nic. If you need/want more bandwidth, get one if those cheap Mikrotik or TP-Link or QNAP switches and a 10Gbps nic off of eBay.
If you’re happy with only a couple of 1Gbps ports, get a cheap $10 1Gbps switch.
Once your ISP starts offering 2Gbps or more you can maybe upgrade the nic or something, maybe they even switch away from pppoe for that, who knows.
This is a very old benchmark I found regarding mpd5 so achieving Gbit speeds shoun’t be much of an issue. FreeBSD – server PPPoE – MPD5 + freeRADIUS – Bogdan Țurcanu
Looking at that and the connection speed I’d guess you’d be fine 
I would also advise against getting old x86 hardware with multiple vulnerabilities and workarounds that kills performance drastically.
Here’s the link in English if anyone else wants to give that PPPoE site a read.
https://www-bogdanturcanu-ro.translate.goog/freebsd-server-pppoe-mpd5-freeradius/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
Agree with dizzy, re hardware bug mitigations
(e g. second hand $100 thin clients might be a good choice for this, with mitigations=off passed to the kernel, this is probably ok since you’re only user - you’re not running untrusted workloads like web browsers running js / cloud machines, random android / iOS apps).
j4125 / i225 based boxes can handle gigabit pppoe , but unless space is at a premium for you, once you spec them out they end up costing you around 300/350 and you can build a DDR4 Alder Lake or Zen3 box.
You only need a GPU for initial setup… but it might be useful for accessing BIOS later or troubleshooting stuff later - e.g. between 5-6 systems not connected to any graphics output, I find that once a year I need to connect something. If you’re doing Intel, go with 12100 not with 12100F.
If you’re doing AMD, get a spare GPU to keep around if you don’t already have something - there’s ones in the 40 euro range that’ll do the job, and you can disconnect later.
This occasional GPU thing and some power saving stuff and the fact you can run jellyfin with quicksync if you want to maybe stream video from this box is why I’m leaning more towards Intel for this type of use case - it’s like 10eur more expensive / 300-350eur entire build cost.
I just stumbled onto this today:
Not super cheap, but with a net card you get 6x 2.5G ports - pretty unique.
