1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:04,120 This is the GL Inet Barrel AX, and they've sponsored today's video 2 00:00:04,120 --> 00:00:08,200 to take a look at this cute, cute little router. 3 00:00:08,200 --> 00:00:11,160 I mean, oh my God, it's so small. 4 00:00:12,120 --> 00:00:16,320 And that's for good reason. Man, it's literally, this could be totally pocket-sized. 5 00:00:16,320 --> 00:00:20,920 It's a travel router, and that's not something I've ever thought that I might need, 6 00:00:20,920 --> 00:00:25,920 or even looked to see if existed, but now that I'm looking at it, it kinda makes sense. 7 00:00:25,920 --> 00:00:28,880 Okay, I mean, here, let's do the pocket test. 8 00:00:28,920 --> 00:00:32,800 Fits in the pocket pretty good. I don't know if I'd recommend putting it in your pocket. 9 00:00:32,800 --> 00:00:37,200 Static electricity is a thing, but it does fit, and I think we're getting ahead of ourselves 10 00:00:37,200 --> 00:00:40,920 a little bit here. Let's look at the rest of the box before we look at it. 11 00:00:40,920 --> 00:00:44,600 We've got a let's get started thing. That's helpful. 12 00:00:44,600 --> 00:00:48,520 Wi-Fi routers can be a little bit tricky in that sometimes. 13 00:00:48,520 --> 00:00:51,560 We've got the little power brick. This thing is really low power. 14 00:00:51,560 --> 00:00:55,400 What is it? 5.3 amps, so a 15-watt power brick, 15 00:00:55,400 --> 00:01:00,800 but the box itself is a max of eight watts. It even comes with all of the little power adapter things, 16 00:01:00,800 --> 00:01:04,680 which normally kinda feels like a cop-out when you get all of them. 17 00:01:04,680 --> 00:01:08,760 It's like, oh, they just made one for all of the different countries. Well, this, it actually makes sense. 18 00:01:08,760 --> 00:01:15,160 If it's a travel router, you wanna have, well, I'm traveling, I need that one, or that one. 19 00:01:15,160 --> 00:01:19,400 I mean, today we'll only need this one. There is also even more flexibility than that. 20 00:01:19,400 --> 00:01:23,160 This is just a normal USB-C power brick thing. 21 00:01:23,160 --> 00:01:28,440 You just need a USB brick that can do 5.3 amp, which most of them should be able to do. 22 00:01:28,440 --> 00:01:34,400 Back to the box itself, though. We've got two Ethernet ports, a 2.5 gig WAN and a LAN. 23 00:01:34,400 --> 00:01:37,920 From my understanding, you can change these around a little bit. 24 00:01:37,920 --> 00:01:41,040 We've got a USB 3.0 port for sharing storage. 25 00:01:41,040 --> 00:01:46,840 That means you could plug an external hard drive into this thing and use it to broadcast like a SMB share 26 00:01:46,840 --> 00:01:51,120 if you have a bunch of photos, or let's say you're traveling and video editing in your hotel room. 27 00:01:51,120 --> 00:01:56,240 You could have your external drive connected to this thing and then edit over Ethernet or Wi-Fi if you want. 28 00:01:56,240 --> 00:01:58,880 What else we got? Man, that's pretty much it. There's not a lot. 29 00:02:00,040 --> 00:02:03,720 I don't know if I'm supposed to open that. That kind of looks like a spot where you might open it. 30 00:02:03,720 --> 00:02:07,640 I think we'll look at that later. On the sides, there's your Wi-Fi antennas. 31 00:02:07,640 --> 00:02:11,560 It's Wi-Fi 6 compatible, so dual band 2.4 and 5 gigahertz. 32 00:02:11,560 --> 00:02:14,880 It supports DFS channels if you're in a congested area 33 00:02:14,880 --> 00:02:18,720 or even if, I mean, you could buy one of these little guys for an apartment if you want. 34 00:02:18,720 --> 00:02:24,000 You got a small apartment, DFS channels, which are using channels that are normally 35 00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:29,280 populated by radar and stuff. It can use those channels to have less congestions, 36 00:02:29,280 --> 00:02:33,720 but man, it's so small. I can see the little fan. There, you can just kind of see it. 37 00:02:33,720 --> 00:02:37,880 I was just looking at the manual because I wanted to know what the toggle switch does. 38 00:02:37,880 --> 00:02:43,400 And I realized, look at this. They have like full board shots. 39 00:02:43,400 --> 00:02:48,040 Who does this? Like it's actually great. They've got it laid out with all the different antennas. 40 00:02:48,040 --> 00:02:52,440 They've got the USB. It looks like there's some terminals here 41 00:02:52,440 --> 00:02:56,920 that you can tag into, power. It's not something you normally see. 42 00:02:56,920 --> 00:03:01,040 Like if you buy a Wi-Fi router, they're not gonna show you photos of the circuit board 43 00:03:01,040 --> 00:03:04,600 inside of it, so it's pretty cool. I guess at this point, we should plug it in and try it, 44 00:03:04,600 --> 00:03:05,440 right? 45 00:03:07,840 --> 00:03:11,240 There we go. Oh, the little spot in the front. It has a little light. 46 00:03:11,240 --> 00:03:14,480 See that? Status indicator, cool. It's nice that it comes with an Ethernet cable, 47 00:03:14,480 --> 00:03:20,960 especially as a travel product. A flat pack, very small Ethernet cable like this. 48 00:03:20,960 --> 00:03:25,480 Kind of perfect. It would be cool if there was a way for this Ethernet cable to store inside the thing, 49 00:03:25,480 --> 00:03:28,720 but I guess you could just wrap it around it or throw it in your bag, whatever. 50 00:03:28,720 --> 00:03:32,960 I don't have an external hard drive, but I do have this little flash drive, so that'll be our stand in. 51 00:03:33,960 --> 00:03:38,400 Yep. And now we're pretty much fully connected. I just gotta get a USB-C to Ethernet 52 00:03:38,400 --> 00:03:41,880 because I have a MacBook and we all know how that goes. 53 00:03:41,880 --> 00:03:45,440 Before we hardware, I wanna connect to the Wi-Fi and see how that works. 54 00:03:45,440 --> 00:03:48,960 Oh, interesting, by default, there's a 5G network 55 00:03:48,960 --> 00:03:52,720 and, well, it doesn't say what this one is. I don't know if this one is a combo 56 00:03:52,720 --> 00:03:56,680 and then there's a separate 5G network, or if it's 2.4 and 5, 57 00:03:56,680 --> 00:04:01,320 I'm gonna assume that it's a 2.4 and a 5G network, which I actually usually prefer. 58 00:04:01,320 --> 00:04:06,880 Yeah, there's the SSID and there's a key. It's good the default password isn't like the password. 59 00:04:06,880 --> 00:04:11,680 I mean, companies haven't done that in a long time, but the password is printed on the bottom. 60 00:04:11,680 --> 00:04:16,760 All right, we're connected. Oh boy, the upstream from this little travel router 61 00:04:16,760 --> 00:04:20,640 is a full one gig fiber connection and I'm on my phone. 62 00:04:20,640 --> 00:04:27,400 I haven't configured anything. I don't know what the default settings are at all. 63 00:04:27,400 --> 00:04:31,320 I haven't even opened the admin page, but let's just do a little speed test for fun. 64 00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:37,400 Damn boy, getting that crispy 800 down. 65 00:04:37,400 --> 00:04:43,000 I was expecting a little router like this to struggle a bit, but getting 750 down, 650 up over Wi-Fi 66 00:04:43,000 --> 00:04:48,600 on something this small is pretty cool. I mean, maybe I'll go over here if you still see me. 67 00:04:48,600 --> 00:04:55,000 I'll have to shout. So I'm like probably 13 feet away, let's say 600 down, 650. 68 00:04:56,720 --> 00:05:01,000 Okay, now I'm probably 30 feet away. 69 00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:04,720 We've got a bunch of duveteen and clothes and metal 70 00:05:04,720 --> 00:05:08,040 and like, I'll stand behind the wall here. 71 00:05:08,040 --> 00:05:11,320 This is a lot trickier of a circumstance. 72 00:05:11,320 --> 00:05:15,560 Not bad, still cracking 500 down. 73 00:05:15,560 --> 00:05:19,440 Upload is a little bit lower, looking like high 300s. 74 00:05:19,440 --> 00:05:22,560 Pretty good. Now we can get into a little bit more of the fun stuff. 75 00:05:22,560 --> 00:05:27,360 I wanna show you guys the web panel for this thing because it might not be what you expect. 76 00:05:27,360 --> 00:05:31,460 It's not like a gaming router 77 00:05:31,460 --> 00:05:34,560 where they have a fancy web panel thing. 78 00:05:34,560 --> 00:05:37,960 It's just OpenWRT, which is actually really nice. 79 00:05:37,960 --> 00:05:41,520 For the uninitiated, OpenWRT is an open source network 80 00:05:41,520 --> 00:05:44,960 routing operating system based on Linux. 81 00:05:44,960 --> 00:05:49,440 So, I mean, in theory, this thing should be supported 82 00:05:49,440 --> 00:05:54,120 for a super long time to come. Even if GLInet stopped producing firmware for it, 83 00:05:54,120 --> 00:05:58,040 I'm sure you could get the open source OpenWRT version and just install that. 84 00:05:58,040 --> 00:06:01,400 It does look like they've made some customizations to it. 85 00:06:01,400 --> 00:06:05,400 We've got like this cool diagram up here. Does this have multi-wan? 86 00:06:05,400 --> 00:06:09,240 Let's see, repeater. Multi-wan, oh, cool. 87 00:06:09,240 --> 00:06:14,680 How can you, oh, interesting. Really, can you use this as a Wi-Fi repeater 88 00:06:14,680 --> 00:06:18,960 and connected to Ethernet at the same time and tethering? 89 00:06:18,960 --> 00:06:23,720 Oh, wow, you totally can. Okay, cellular, you can plug in a USB cellular modem 90 00:06:23,720 --> 00:06:27,960 and use this as your Wi-Fi, that's pretty cool. I do wanna try repeater. 91 00:06:27,960 --> 00:06:31,040 Hey, look at that, okay, LMG, let's try that. 92 00:06:31,040 --> 00:06:38,160 Look at that, that's pretty cool. We're connected to LMG5 and to the Ethernet. 93 00:06:38,160 --> 00:06:43,160 Let's try the failover, because that's how I'm set up right now. My laptop is just connected to this Ethernet cable. 94 00:06:43,160 --> 00:06:48,520 Wi-Fi's turned off. This little guy is connected to that one gig fiber link 95 00:06:48,520 --> 00:06:55,040 and then our office Wi-Fi. So if I unplug the one gig fiber box, 96 00:06:55,080 --> 00:06:58,360 it detected right away. I didn't even drop a single ping. 97 00:06:58,360 --> 00:07:02,080 That's pretty good. I mean, sometimes failover like this, 98 00:07:02,080 --> 00:07:06,220 it can take a little while. My ping's hopping up a little bit, but that's... 99 00:07:06,220 --> 00:07:10,720 I mean, I'm connected to Wi-Fi, so that makes sense right now. And if I connect back to Ethernet, 100 00:07:10,720 --> 00:07:15,760 the ping should stay pretty consistent. Okay, I lost one ping, switching back to the Ethernet, 101 00:07:15,760 --> 00:07:20,000 but that's totally reasonable. I don't know if I would need this, 102 00:07:20,000 --> 00:07:23,680 but I'm sure there are people out there that would. I mean, I can definitely see this failover 103 00:07:23,680 --> 00:07:26,800 being used with a cellular puck. 104 00:07:26,800 --> 00:07:29,800 Maybe if you had like Starlink, because you're out in the boonies 105 00:07:29,800 --> 00:07:36,020 and then you had like a second satellite connection, or if you had like a Starlink and a cellular, 106 00:07:36,020 --> 00:07:41,640 or if you had, you're at like a convention and they have Wi-Fi, but it kind of sucks. 107 00:07:41,640 --> 00:07:45,320 And then you also have cellular, but it kind of sucks because there's so many people. 108 00:07:45,320 --> 00:07:48,520 Well, why not use both, right? It's cool that the web interface 109 00:07:48,520 --> 00:07:50,240 updates pretty much immediately. 110 00:07:51,720 --> 00:07:58,080 I mean, it realized that the Ethernet had been plugged in and it is requesting a DHCP address like immediately. 111 00:07:58,120 --> 00:07:59,880 Let's see if I turn the Wi-Fi off. 112 00:08:01,760 --> 00:08:06,600 Okay, I disabled Wi-Fi. Didn't drop a packet either. 113 00:08:06,600 --> 00:08:11,080 Pretty cool. Oh, also we have our cable thing now, so let's try tethering too, why not? 114 00:08:11,080 --> 00:08:16,380 When was the last time anyone tethered with a cable? I kind of forgot that that was even an option. 115 00:08:16,380 --> 00:08:19,400 Tethering, oh, look at that. Pop right up, ETH2, iOS. 116 00:08:19,400 --> 00:08:23,320 No way, that's so cool. Disconnect the Ethernet. 117 00:08:23,320 --> 00:08:26,760 Okay, I lost one ping and now we're using 118 00:08:26,760 --> 00:08:31,840 the cellular connection from my phone over USB. I'm sure all the open WRT people in the comments are like, 119 00:08:31,840 --> 00:08:36,600 this is so normal and easy. Like in open sense, it takes so long. 120 00:08:36,600 --> 00:08:42,120 It takes like 10 seconds for it to realize. I guess by default it's because we have it set to, 121 00:08:42,120 --> 00:08:46,480 it wants 100% packet loss and there's like a period that it tests over and that's probably part of why, 122 00:08:46,480 --> 00:08:51,280 but it works shockingly well. Over in the Wi-Fi settings, it's pretty standard affair. 123 00:08:51,280 --> 00:08:56,520 You can change the name, you can change the security type. Does support WPA3, which is cool. 124 00:08:56,520 --> 00:09:00,240 You can change your SSID if it's shown. You can change the modes that are available. 125 00:09:00,240 --> 00:09:06,600 You can switch the channel width, the channel. You can enable a guest Wi-Fi name if you want. 126 00:09:06,600 --> 00:09:11,760 We've got a client list here. We can see network acceleration is enabled. 127 00:09:11,760 --> 00:09:16,520 Client speed or abnormal. Client speed limit is not working. Network acceleration reduces CPU load 128 00:09:16,520 --> 00:09:19,760 and speeds up traffic packet forwarding, but can conflict with some features. 129 00:09:19,760 --> 00:09:23,480 This is hardware acceleration. Yeah, it says right there, hardware acceleration. That makes sense. 130 00:09:23,480 --> 00:09:26,600 So these speeds and traffics might not be accurate 131 00:09:26,600 --> 00:09:31,840 because when you enable hardware acceleration, things like that get a little bit harder to have function, 132 00:09:31,840 --> 00:09:37,600 but I can see all of the devices. I can see their IP addresses and in theory, the speed. 133 00:09:37,600 --> 00:09:41,080 What else we got in here? Applications, plugins, whoa. 134 00:09:41,080 --> 00:09:44,840 Plugins look to be the standard open WRT package manager. 135 00:09:44,840 --> 00:09:48,360 We've got dynamic DNS, which can be helpful, good cloud. 136 00:09:48,360 --> 00:09:51,600 Check their stats in real time, set up routers remotely, operate routers and batch 137 00:09:51,600 --> 00:09:56,920 and monitor connected devices. Oh cool, I guess if you had like a fleet of these little routers and all of your business guys 138 00:09:56,920 --> 00:10:02,680 that are out on travel, take them with them, then you can kind of monitor and manage them remotely 139 00:10:02,680 --> 00:10:06,080 with a service that's hosted by them, which is cool. We've got network storage. 140 00:10:06,080 --> 00:10:09,160 Okay, this one we can actually try. I've got a USB stick. 141 00:10:09,160 --> 00:10:13,800 File services, let's turn on Samba, which is like the Linux version of SMB. 142 00:10:13,800 --> 00:10:17,000 Ah, this is a Windows install disk. So this might be a little screwy, 143 00:10:17,000 --> 00:10:20,040 but let's say boot is gonna be the folder. 144 00:10:20,040 --> 00:10:23,040 You should set up a user if you're gonna have network storage 145 00:10:23,040 --> 00:10:27,480 available on your network. I'm just doing it like this to make it easier for me to connect. 146 00:10:27,480 --> 00:10:31,560 Guest, connect. Hey, look at that. 147 00:10:31,560 --> 00:10:34,600 AdGuard Home. It's a network-wide software for ad blocking. 148 00:10:34,600 --> 00:10:37,680 Yeah, okay, I can just enable that. So what, now I have ad blocking? 149 00:10:37,680 --> 00:10:43,280 It's really that easy. Obviously as content creators, we'd love if you didn't use ad blocking 150 00:10:43,280 --> 00:10:46,760 since it pays the bills, but in theory, I am now ad blocking. 151 00:10:46,760 --> 00:10:50,320 Look at that, blocked by filters, 144. 152 00:10:50,320 --> 00:10:53,800 Great, it's working, that was easy. If you're into that, there you go. 153 00:10:53,800 --> 00:10:58,440 I might forgive you for using ad block on LTT if you were subscribed to Flowplain. 154 00:10:58,440 --> 00:11:03,400 We've got parental controls. You can add profiles for each device it looks like. 155 00:11:03,400 --> 00:11:06,720 Oh yeah, I don't have any children with me right now, aside from me. 156 00:11:06,720 --> 00:11:10,080 Oh, it's got zero tier built-in. This wasn't in the notes. And tail scale. 157 00:11:10,080 --> 00:11:13,200 Zero tier and tail scale are peer-to-peer VPNs, 158 00:11:13,200 --> 00:11:17,240 which are super cool. So you can just join this to your zero tier or tail net, 159 00:11:17,240 --> 00:11:21,360 just like that. That's so cool. Firewall, that's pretty standard. 160 00:11:21,360 --> 00:11:24,560 You can port forward if you want. We've got the multi-wan we talked about before. 161 00:11:24,560 --> 00:11:30,360 The LAN side, we can edit the router IP address. It's a little weird that it's only the middle digit though. 162 00:11:30,360 --> 00:11:35,400 Oh, and okay, you click advance, you can change this to whatever you want. You can configure your DNS servers, 163 00:11:35,400 --> 00:11:40,640 create your own private network. You can put it in access point mode where this is literally just a Wi-Fi box 164 00:11:40,640 --> 00:11:43,640 and the WAN would be like an in from a router. 165 00:11:43,640 --> 00:11:47,240 That's, I imagine a pretty common use case. 166 00:11:47,240 --> 00:11:52,180 You can just set it up to be a Wi-Fi extender or a Wi-Fi extender in WDS mode. 167 00:11:52,180 --> 00:11:56,860 Hey, there's a little stats page, that's cute. We're using almost all of our half a Gigabyte RAM, 168 00:11:56,860 --> 00:12:03,380 although most of it is cache right now. You can see our storage, we've got 154 megabytes left on the internal storage. 169 00:12:03,380 --> 00:12:07,460 There's a firmware updater. Oh, you can turn the LED off if you don't want it. 170 00:12:07,460 --> 00:12:12,800 You can turn the Wi-Fi off on a schedule if you don't want it. You can change your time zone, let's sync it. 171 00:12:12,800 --> 00:12:16,140 Yeah, I don't want UTC, I want America Vancouver, perfect. 172 00:12:16,140 --> 00:12:20,740 The toggle button, ah, it's configurable. That's why they don't say what it does. 173 00:12:20,740 --> 00:12:24,260 You can set it to toggle ad guard home on and off. 174 00:12:24,260 --> 00:12:29,140 You can set it to toggle your open VPN on and off, tour or wire guard, which actually brings me 175 00:12:29,140 --> 00:12:33,040 to a very good point of kind of who is this made for? 176 00:12:33,040 --> 00:12:36,100 And one of the use cases that I could definitely see 177 00:12:36,100 --> 00:12:39,100 is having this be a VPN client. 178 00:12:39,100 --> 00:12:42,900 So say you're traveling with a coworker or even just by yourself, 179 00:12:42,900 --> 00:12:48,500 you could configure this as an open VPN or wire guard client for your works VPN. 180 00:12:48,500 --> 00:12:52,420 And then when you connect to it, it's kind of just like you're at the office. 181 00:12:52,420 --> 00:12:56,860 It drops you onto that VPN network and you can access anything you would normally access 182 00:12:56,860 --> 00:12:59,900 on your VPN without having to run it on your laptop 183 00:12:59,900 --> 00:13:04,540 or run it on your phone or if you have some other device that isn't easily configurable, 184 00:13:04,540 --> 00:13:08,220 you can drop it right on there and you don't have to do any configuration. 185 00:13:08,220 --> 00:13:12,740 It's just on immediately and say, well, now I wanna be off my work network. 186 00:13:12,740 --> 00:13:16,620 I hit my toggle switch and bam, I'm off the work network. 187 00:13:16,620 --> 00:13:23,180 And it's not even just a work VPN. You can use say like a kind of a more privacy VPN 188 00:13:23,180 --> 00:13:29,540 like a Nord VPN or PIA where you're just using that to obfuscate your IP address. 189 00:13:29,540 --> 00:13:32,860 This can run that for you. And again, so you don't have to configure it 190 00:13:32,860 --> 00:13:37,100 on the individual devices. So why don't we try connecting to one of these? 191 00:13:37,100 --> 00:13:40,260 We're now connected to a remote wire guard server, 192 00:13:40,260 --> 00:13:43,980 this IP, which you're not gonna be able to see is correct for that server. 193 00:13:43,980 --> 00:13:47,180 And if we run a speed test, obviously this is gonna be way slower 194 00:13:47,180 --> 00:13:52,100 than the full speed of this WAN because running a VPN and handling that encryption, 195 00:13:52,100 --> 00:13:57,700 it's a lot of processing power to do that. Right now we're getting a download speed of 150 megabit 196 00:13:57,700 --> 00:14:02,620 and we'll see our upload is around 150 as well. 197 00:14:02,620 --> 00:14:08,540 They rate on their website for wire guard. They can do a max of 300 and open VPN a max of 150. 198 00:14:08,540 --> 00:14:11,740 I haven't tested that wire guard VPN with any other clients. 199 00:14:11,740 --> 00:14:16,940 So I don't know if that's the limitation here on their website. They do say they can do about 300, 300 through wire guard. 200 00:14:16,940 --> 00:14:21,700 We're getting about half of that, but they do say that it's a max rated speed. So it really depends on the configuration 201 00:14:21,700 --> 00:14:26,300 and your mileage will definitely vary. Man, there's actually a lot of settings in here. 202 00:14:26,300 --> 00:14:30,980 You can set it to only use the VPN for certain domains. 203 00:14:30,980 --> 00:14:34,740 You can set it to use the VPN only on certain devices 204 00:14:34,740 --> 00:14:37,740 or on certain VLANs. It's pretty damn cool. 205 00:14:37,740 --> 00:14:41,820 I don't know what else there is to say about this thing. It's cute and small, fits in your pocket. 206 00:14:41,820 --> 00:14:45,580 It's got a lot of cool features like multi-WAN and failover 207 00:14:45,860 --> 00:14:49,820 seems to rip pretty good and it's not crazy expensive. 208 00:14:49,820 --> 00:14:54,980 It's 119 on their website right now. And if you use our coupon code, which will be right here 209 00:14:54,980 --> 00:14:58,220 and also in the description, you can get yourself a discount 210 00:14:58,220 --> 00:15:02,020 if you pick one of these things up. I might just put in my pocket and go away, 211 00:15:02,020 --> 00:15:06,380 but not before telling you to subscribe, like this video and watch more ShortCircuit.