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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1525170
I was unable to find any information about the proper orientation of the router and antennas, but the best position I can place it in on the shelf I have it on in my basement so far has provided plenty of coverage wherever I’ve tested it in my house, even to the far side of the second floor, the furthest you can get from the router in the house. Two of the ethernet jacks on the back are designed for either gigabit or 2.5 gigabit use. Either of these jacks can be used as your internet connection, if you’re connecting the router directly to your modem. You can even use both for a multi-WAN setup if you have two internet lines coming into your home or office. If your internet connection(s) is faster than gigabit, this would be a great router to split up that speed to the rest of your network. If that’s not the case, however, you’re going to be giving up one of your 2.5 gigabit connections, meaning you won’t have the ability to have two computers or a computer and RAID drive connected to each other at that speed on your network. It would be nice to have at least one more 2.5 gigabit capable connection to accommodate setups like this, but for the price this is still a very capable device. On the WiFi side the router supports up to 1,148 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz side, and up to 4,804 Mbps on the 5 GHz network. The USB 3.0 port allows for connection of a USB flash drive or hard drive or a USB modem or phone to be used for tethering. The USB drive can be formatted NTFS or FAT32; I was unable to find any information about size limitations of the drive or the speed of the USB interface. The built-in software supports a large number of features, enabled by the OpenWrt operating system, as well as LuCI for more advanced configuration options. Built-in software features include Dynamic DNS, GoodCloud (GL.iNet’s service for remotely accessing and managing their routers), Adguard, ZeroTier, and Tailscale. If that’s not enough to customize the router exactly the way you want it, there is a large number of plugins available, from what seems like an open-source repository. The list of plugins when I checked was 1,182 pages of 8 apps each, for a total of 9,456 apps. Many of them are either different versions of the same software, or related to each other, but it’s still a huge library of optional applications to choose from. One of the applications I noticed is an Apache web server, and another is Adblock (different from the built-in Adguard). I don’t recognize most of the others because they’re out of the realm of my previous experience, but I do plan to look through them to see if there’s anything that can help me with my own setup down the road. There is an option to see how many of these plugins are installed and it showed me that there are 443 on this router out of the box. In addition to installing applications, there is an update mechanism built in. My router had 13 updates available, all related to the Lua programming language. I’ve never worked with that myself, but I have heard about it before in relation to home automation so maybe I’ll have a use for it in the future. The updates all installed in a few seconds each. Another set of software features that are built in are OpenVPN client and server options, as well as WireGuard client and server options. In the same section is the option to configure Tor if that is something you need. Assembly, Installation, Setup After taking the router out of the box and plugging it in you just need to plug it in to your modem or other networking equipment, depending on the mode you want to use it in. When I first set mine up I put it in access point mode so I could use it with my existing home network. In this mode some of the software features are not available, such as Adguard and parental