After I changed my mobile plan, China Unicom upgraded my broadband from 100M to 200M not long afterward. That meant my 100M Xiaomi 3C router could no longer keep up. I spent a while tinkering with LEDE, and it turned out to be pretty decent. Here's how the whole thing went.
First, a quick comparison between the old setup and the new one:
<table> <thead> <tr> <th></th> <th>Old setup</th> <th>New setup</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Primary device</td> <td>Unicom optical modem</td> <td>Unicom optical modem</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Secondary device</td> <td>LEDE soft router / Xiaomi 3C</td> <td>Huawei AX3 Pro</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Photo backup</td> <td>Soft router</td> <td>Star Snail C running Synology 3617</td> </tr> </tbody> </table>A simple gigabit router would have been enough, honestly. But the point was to tinker. I sold my J1900 four-port soft router on Xianyu and swapped it for a Snail C. The specs are basically the same, but the real goal was to run Synology, store some photos and videos, and give my 'little ladies' a stable home.
I missed the first wave of cheap mining-farm castoffs, so I had to hunt for a Snail myself. After looking for a long time, I finally found one. The condition wasn't great, but the C chassis is the sturdiest of the Snail cases. The seller had lost two drive trays and replaced them with A-model trays. They work, but the front doesn't look quite right. I'm a Virgo, yet apparently I don't care that much about these details. When it arrived, the seller had also forgotten to include the power cable. I did the obvious hack: pulled the cord off the rice cooker, plugged it in to test, and then ordered another cable online. After that, I found three hard drives locally—two 500GB and one 1TB—to see whether the setup would chew through drives. If they died, they died. I set them up in RAID5. It wastes some capacity, but I'd rather sacrifice space than risk losing drives to a power cut or some other disaster.
The appeal of these mining castoffs is the four drive bays. Synology is widely considered the best option, so I installed an unofficial Synology setup—a 'black Synology.' I thought about 'whitening' it and registering it as genuine, but I heard that after December 2020, more than 90% of those attempts got banned. So I skipped it. Who knows what the higher-ups are thinking; whitening codes are everywhere, and whether you get banned seems to depend on their mood. I installed 3617, Docker, and even a BT client.
The big frustration is that Unicom simply won't give me a public IP. Complaining once a month didn't help; they just told me to get a dedicated line. That's a headache. Since I can't use IPv4, I fell back to IPv6 and paired it with Aliyun dynamic DNS. It works well, but plenty of devices still don't support IPv6. I assume IPv6 will gradually become mainstream.
It has been running steadily for half a month now. Power draw is low—just a few extra yuan of electricity a month. I'm thinking about getting into PT later. That's about it for now.