gigabit WAN

Vodafone was successful in upselling a faster connection to me. Now we have 1Gbps downstream and 50Mbps upstream. Just yesterday, the modem came by mail.

The Modem

It’s a CGA6444VF.

There was no WiFi, because that’s ~3€ per month. LOL.

You can disable its firewall, but only for 24 hours. WTF?

Fortunately, there is Bridge-Mode.

• https://www.vodafone.de/featured/service-hilfe/vodafone-bridge-mode-aktivieren/#/

• https://www.vodafone.de/meinvodafone/services/meine-produkte/internet-phone/geraete-einstellungen

• https://www.vodafone.de/meinvodafone/services/bridgeMode/bridge-mode-aktivieren

Now the modum is yet another dumb box next to my real router running OpenWrt - just how I like it. :)

Speedtests

• https://speed.cloudflare.com/

• https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat

• https://fast.com/

• https://speedtest.net/

OpenWrt Routing/NAT Offloading

When I ran the speed tests, I was underwhelmed. I got about 300Mbps down and 5Mbps up. htop reported load 4. All of the four CPUs were saturated.

Thanks to a post on the OpenWrt forums, I stumbled upon NAT offloading, i.e. using hardware to handle NAT requests. Another poster directed me to the following:

Configuration

In LuCI:

• Network > Firewall > General Settings > Routing/NAT Offloading

  • [x] Software flow offloading

  • [x] Hardware flow offloading

Note

OpenWrt says that NAT Offloading is an “Experimental feature. Not fully compatible with QoS/SQM.”

Result

Afterwards I got full speed and the router’s load stayed below 0.1. Nice! 🤓

setup.cfg –> pyproject.toml   TIL: vim K