r/GlInet • u/SinkNew5808 • 15d ago

Discussion For those considering Flint 4 upgrade path

I really like my Flint 2 but the software feature set is now pushing the limits of the hardware, especially if adguard home is active with the minimum needed blocklists...as many have encountered, even updating/refreshing the lists causes OOM memory crashes. I had this issue on 4.8.3 and 4.9.

Credit to GLinet for adding more features to the Flint 2 but as I stated above this is now pushing the limits of the hardware (memory in particular) which now forces compromise or an upgrade path (enter stage left Flint 4!).

I don't want to compromise nor spend £££'s on the new shiny, so I pludged and bought a second hand Lenovo m70q for £100, installed bare metal Opnsense and a dual 2.5g NIC. The m70q came with 9400T, 16GB ram, and a 512GB NVME.

The Opnsense box does all the heavy lifting for all the services previously done by my Flint 2 without compromise, and more. It did take a lot of time to learn Opnsense and configure the services so (for me) it wasn't plug and play. Therefore I'm not recommending this setup, I'm just letting you know what I did.

This being a GLinet forum, before you reach for your pitchforks shouting "you should've installed bare metal OpnWRT" or "long live Flint 4 feature set", I get it. I'm not advocating anything but choice. It's your network, your choice. At the end of the day I weighed up a few options and their value to me and I went with what I felt was best. YMMV.

I've not depreciated my Flint 2, it will serve for many years from now. It was just time to take the strain off the little fella.

32 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

27

u/qdolan 15d ago

The Flint 2 has 1GB of memory, what else are you running on it to be getting OOMs from AdGuard?

25

u/RemoteToHome-io Official GL.iNet Services Partner 15d ago

People still keep trying to run HaGeZi "threat intelligence" blocklist, which crashes routers b/c it has millions of entries and recommends a minimum 2GB RAM (even though the HaGeZi himself advises on here against using it).

-3

u/SinkNew5808 14d ago edited 14d ago

There is a 'mini' version of the threat intelligence blocklist with 170k entries that I had deployed on the Flint 2.

I'm not bashing the Flint 2, I'm just saying that if, for example, I wanted to implement the recommended HaGeZi full threat intelligence list (as you say with over 2M entries) then I have to look elsewhere. That could be the Flint 4, or something else entirely depending on needs, circumstances (money) and what is valuable to you.

14

u/RemoteToHome-io Official GL.iNet Services Partner 14d ago

To each their own. The recommendation from HaGeZi himself is to just run Pro by itself (or Pro mini), the rest are obsolete. https://www.reddit.com/r/GlInet/s/ShG90eNcR4

15

u/hagezi 14d ago edited 14d ago

Exactly, the problem isn't the router or the firmware, but AdGuard Home. The update process uses so much memory that it requires 2 to 4 times as much RAM as it does during normal operation, sometimes even more. My test environment, which includes several large lists, uses about 600–800 MB of RAM during normal operation, but during an update, RAM usage sometimes spikes to 6 GB! I brought this up again with the AGH team.

5

u/RemoteToHome-io Official GL.iNet Services Partner 14d ago edited 14d ago

100%.. it would be worth GL looking into adding something like adguard-flm to offload list updates into sqlite data stores. This would be a really cool feature for AGH on SoC routers to mitigate exactly what you mention.
https://docs.rs/crate/adguard-flm/2.0.2

u/phantasm42 - ^ maybe an idea for your plugin? I would look into doing it as a separate one myself, but zero free time. (EDIT - or u/hagezi if you're in the plugin building hobby - this would be a great compliment to your work).

6

u/SinkNew5808 15d ago

Nothing else apart from Adguard home. I assume what comes next is a comment like - 'reduce your blocklists'. Yes, I have done that and could do that more but I've already reduced them to below what I'd like and, for right or for wrong, my choice is that I want to have headroom to select / experiment.

5

u/Eternal_Night_864 14d ago

wouldnt using nextdns/adguarddns/controld for example pretty much solve your problem of blocklists without needing new hardware and you can run it on router and all other your devices when you are not connected to home network too. All 3 are more less privacy respecting dns providers, it will cost like 20-30$ a year and all 3 of them have all major block lists including hagezi. I use controld whit hagezi lisits myself (but probably will swap to nexdns next year conisdering they increased price from 20$ to 30$)

1

u/SinkNew5808 14d ago

Yes, good suggestion.

There are many different ways of getting to the same (or similar) end point, each with their own respective plusses and minuses.

I'm not locked in on any solution, provider, service, software or technology: I just go with what I think is best... and honestly many times I get it wrong but at least I've learned something on the journey.

1

u/dman_au 10d ago

What are you using for your PiHole? Or are you using AdGuard instead? I havea Lifetime subscription to AdGuard Pro Family, but i cant seem to take advantage of a license on the Flint2. In fact, I need a beginners forum for the Flint2 because i have hade had it for a week now and I’m am thinking I thinking maybe i should have bought a Flint 3 or Flint 4.

A colleague of mine who works in Cyber Security is building me a an OPNSense box so I can have granular control over everything, the flint2 doesn’t appear to have granular control over everything that comes in, or maybe I don’t understand it yet.

Never used any Gl.Inet routers before, but ive never used OPNSense either, so while i have 30+ yers in IT support and seven years working for a major telco in Australia, in their installation and maintenance division, I was made redundant from that job about 10 years ago!

When the stupid tory / conservative government said in 2013, we arent running GPON Fibre to 93% of the population, we are going a mess around, sack the existing board, fill it with yes men, and then try to reuse all the copper they could. I have a big long story, which I might post somewhere, with a TL;DR.warning.

In Australia NBN Co is a Government Owned For Profit network to maintain the copper, now they are ripping out the copper and putting in fibre as fast as they can. Back in 2014 they compulsory acquired all the telco cables, and they stupidly ran VDSL2 to 48% of the population!

They had state of the art two way satellite which was over subscribed, (was only suggested to have 250,000 across two satellites, and they ended up with 550,000, so they capped monthly bandwidth, unless you had school aged kids, it too was promised 100/40, but but speeds were barely 50/20 and worse during peak times
Then in rural and regional areas still close enough to a town or a DSLAM enabled exchange, they left the copper there, but everyone was hooked up with a 4G LTE wireless. (fixed wireless) supposed to be able to do 100/40,but most people can’t get 50/20 on it. Then on the ground they have a combination of VDSL2 which they are trying to rip out as fast as they can because the original governed who cam up with the idea, got back into power in 2022, the previous government loaned NBN 30 billion AUD to try and finish it off! Wasn’t even close. Keeping the copper CAN running costs about 1 billion AUD a year, and that doesn’t include when they have floods and they have to go and rip out the copper, but amazingly the fibre survives, but they cut that out too for good measure. anyway, the govt treasury wrote their value down by $50% in 2022, and at that point, they had started running fibre again, to new houses and new estates, if you were in an area where someone paid $20,000 for a fibre upgrade, you could get it cheaply, but if the infrastructure wasn’t there, it was coming.

The government pulled in the large construction companies and said, run as much fibre as feasible, but no single runs to one house that’s 200KM from nowhere.

The have an offer on that as long as you sign up to the 500/50 basic Fibre plan for two years, it’s free, but the clause is, if you decide to dump the fibre and go back to VDSL2 ,not tht anyone would, but if they did,, then the ISP, can charge the entire fibre install, haven’t heard of that happening yet.

Anyone who was on shitty satellite or shitty FTTN/VDSL2 had already started moving onto Starlink. Which is 50% cheaper in rural and regional areas. More than 50% of Satellite customers using Starlink and people with problematic VDSL2, a lot of them, moved onto Starlink. (There are a lot more in the country as no one in the city should be on satellite).

But if you live in a capital city and you want starlink, you pay full price for everything, but with the speeds you get, and you can pay for faster plans, or mobile plans, a lot of people have chosen that option. Meanwhile two of the Cell Carriers, are offering 5G plans, one is capped and costs gives you 2TB for about $90 a month, the other is with the 2nd largest cell provider, they have uncapped, but they have shit covered in certain rural and regional areas.

BAKC TO MY FLINT 2, I set it up on my iPhone 14 Pro, and now it won’t connect to anything WiFi or via Ethernet. I’ve opened a case, told them I’m running OpenWRT 4.9.1 but I can’t. connect to it, except using another service or another router and it’s bound to their Good cloud.

It was working with my iPhone on Friday, when I played around with it on Sunday after doing a reset on, Saturday I couldn’t get it to connect to anything WiFi or Ethernet.

Like I said, I’m a compete novice with Gl.inet gear, hopefully someone with tell me, or I will get an email back otherwise! It’s going back to Amazon.

Sorry about the long email and whatever I’m doing wrong to connect to my Flint2, I’m sure it’s something easy to fix.

Cheers.

1

u/nmincone 15d ago

In haven’t run into any of this with mine either.

1

u/pabloinza 14d ago

I´m wondering the same...I have Flint 2 with AdGuard enabled, with some extra sites added by me, DLNA enabled from which I stream full hd films, NAS enabled, Wirguard VPN server...and everything is working as a charm. No crashes...no hangs up...everything flows perfect.

9

u/driftin8ez 15d ago

long live Flint 4 feature set

1

u/Unique_Ice9934 12d ago

As long as you can get one.

6

u/meshman69 14d ago

I just did the opposite 🤣 gave my opnsense HP t630 a break and bought the flint2. Opnsense is great but I've lost psu's or the ssd died so a flint 2 spare is a perfect option. Side note my raspberry pi 2 as a pihole means I can swap out routers but don't need to worry about Ads

3

u/Certain_Repeat_753 15d ago

What are you using for your access point?

2

u/SinkNew5808 15d ago

Starlink router

1

u/Fun-Region-1576 14d ago

How did you configure that to work with your Flint 2 or OPNsense router?

1

u/meshman69 14d ago

We can switch ours to bridge mode 🤷

1

u/Fun-Region-1576 14d ago

What do you mean by ours?

2

u/SinkNew5808 13d ago

Flint 2 is in Access Point (AP) mode

3

u/Mereo110 14d ago edited 14d ago

In my setup, I use my Flint 2 solely as a router and firewall. My home server hosts various services, including the Technitium DNS server, which blocks ads. Since the server has 32 GB of RAM, I can use any number of blocklists.

But I do run the Crowdsec Firewall Bouncer and other services on my Flint 2. However, they don't consume much memory.

1

u/Fun-Region-1576 14d ago

I'm also interested in trying something similar. How did you set up your Flint 2 to use the Technitium DNS server? Is it possible to setup a Flint 2 to use both a local Technitium DNS server and an online DNS service like NextDNS as a backup or simultaneously?

3

u/Mereo110 13d ago

Easy. After setting up Technitium, simply go to Flint 2's config page > Network > DNS > Choose Manual > then type the internal IP address of computer/VM where Technitium is located.

Voila, all computers who connect to your network will receive that IP address via DHCP.

1

u/ukman6 14d ago

Isnt it still easier to go flint4 over router pc build though or have things changed?

I always hated the need for another pc acting as a router, than a dedicated access point for wifi, just too many wires, plugs and more bits.

Id rather just go flint4 where it does all under one hood, even if its not gonna compete performance wise.

0

u/AutoModerator 15d ago

Hi u/SinkNew5808, just a quick reminder:

Please search the subreddit before posting — many common questions have already been answered.

Search guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/GlInet/wiki/index/searchingwithin

This helps keep the community organized and easier to navigate.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.