I just got a Chateau LTE18AX. While it’s performing nicely in the LTE and WiFi areas, I was disappointed to see that its IPQ SoC supports almost no hardware offloading.
Which means that the device is probably better used as a plain access point and an LTE client, and let actual routing for some other device.
What would be the most performant and robust setup to transfer the LTE and Wifis into my main router?
I was thinking to disable all routing and NAT, and create two separate bridges on eth1 and eth5 to get the full speed of the two physical connections. But I read that only one bridge is officially supported and can use off-loading, and additional ones could create unpredictable issues.
So maybe leave everything into a single bridge, and just tag VLANS for LTE and guest wifi, and transfer them through the switches to the router?
What signs/problems/etc are you seeing where hardware offloading would even matter?
e.g. Is the CPU and/or memory load high on the Chateau? Is there other WANs than LTE that increasing the routing load?
If there is a lot of local LAN-to-LAN traffic, perhaps a switch might be better for those links. But if it’s normal LAN to WAN, just seems the LTE interface/network be the limiting factor.
I love the flexibility and speed of having a separate beefy main router, because I can simply experiment with devices with minimal impact to my network. Plus, I can work with things like wireguard and zerotier without worrying about affecting the wire-speed. I am currently using an ER-4 and soon I am getting an RB5009 so there is no need to load the Chateau any more than it has to (and waste energy and heat). All it has to do is LTE and WiFi and pass them to the router (preferably through multiple Ethernet cables).
For now, my only hard requirements are to eliminate the double NAT, as I have the Chateau’s LAN connected on the WAN of my router. And replace my current UAP with Chateau’s wifi
For WiFis, I guess I can keep them bridged to the rest of the ports, and just pass them to the router as vlans. I would have to remove the DHCP server on the chateau and add clients so that it gets its IPs from the main router dhcp. Is there a cleaner way to do that?
The thing that restricts me for now is that ER-4 only has 3 ports. So I can’t really have everything as it should, plus a failover VDSL. I have a couple of managed switches that I could use for now, but I want to eliminate them for simplicity (plus I hate that they get so hot because of their POE)
The RB5009 will make my whole setup a lot cleaner
Fair enough – I just ask question when folks start with “hardware offloading” as the issue
Yes. Since you mention wanting multiple ethernet… this actually makes passthrough even simpler to configure. If you take the port that going to the ER-4 / future RB5009 out of the bridge, and then mark it as passthrough in LTE app profile… that’s about it. Just like the docs.
Nope. And yeah, that 2nd ethernet go can to a port that’s in Chateau bridge. You should leave the firewall - it won’t be used for Wi-Fi part since that be forwarded by bridge & DHCP come from the main router. But leaving the firewall allows it still be a router again with minimal changes e.g. adding back a DHCP server to the LAN on Chateau if had to “take over” should the ER4/RB5009 fail/etc.
The RB5009s are great devices.
One thing to consider is eventually adding a virtual router IP (via VRRP) so that if you reboot the RB5009 (or in playing around, break something), the Chateau can provide be the route. Since the Chateau likely service most needs just fine, it might be useful stop gap if one of the your future experiments goes south . I’d get things working first! But since you expressed interest in “playing around”… VRRP is pretty simple: add a VRRP interface+address on the LAN bridge(or vlan) on BOTH routers, and have the DHCP Server be setup same on both, except listening on the VRRP interface. Only one virtual router (VRRP interface) can be active, and it’s controlled by the VRRP priority, so only one DHCP be active any time. See https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/VRRP
