This is the GL Inet Barrel AX, and they've sponsored today's video
to take a look at this cute, cute little router.
I mean, oh my God, it's so small.
And that's for good reason. Man, it's literally, this could be totally pocket-sized.
It's a travel router, and that's not something I've ever thought that I might need,
or even looked to see if existed, but now that I'm looking at it, it kinda makes sense.
Okay, I mean, here, let's do the pocket test.
Fits in the pocket pretty good. I don't know if I'd recommend putting it in your pocket.
Static electricity is a thing, but it does fit, and I think we're getting ahead of ourselves
a little bit here. Let's look at the rest of the box before we look at it.
We've got a let's get started thing. That's helpful.
Wi-Fi routers can be a little bit tricky in that sometimes.
We've got the little power brick. This thing is really low power.
What is it? 5.3 amps, so a 15-watt power brick,
but the box itself is a max of eight watts. It even comes with all of the little power adapter things,
which normally kinda feels like a cop-out when you get all of them.
It's like, oh, they just made one for all of the different countries. Well, this, it actually makes sense.
If it's a travel router, you wanna have, well, I'm traveling, I need that one, or that one.
I mean, today we'll only need this one. There is also even more flexibility than that.
This is just a normal USB-C power brick thing.
You just need a USB brick that can do 5.3 amp, which most of them should be able to do.
Back to the box itself, though. We've got two Ethernet ports, a 2.5 gig WAN and a LAN.
From my understanding, you can change these around a little bit.
We've got a USB 3.0 port for sharing storage.
That means you could plug an external hard drive into this thing and use it to broadcast like a SMB share
if you have a bunch of photos, or let's say you're traveling and video editing in your hotel room.
You could have your external drive connected to this thing and then edit over Ethernet or Wi-Fi if you want.
What else we got? Man, that's pretty much it. There's not a lot.
I don't know if I'm supposed to open that. That kind of looks like a spot where you might open it.
I think we'll look at that later. On the sides, there's your Wi-Fi antennas.
It's Wi-Fi 6 compatible, so dual band 2.4 and 5 gigahertz.
It supports DFS channels if you're in a congested area
or even if, I mean, you could buy one of these little guys for an apartment if you want.
You got a small apartment, DFS channels, which are using channels that are normally
populated by radar and stuff. It can use those channels to have less congestions,
but man, it's so small. I can see the little fan. There, you can just kind of see it.
I was just looking at the manual because I wanted to know what the toggle switch does.
And I realized, look at this. They have like full board shots.
Who does this? Like it's actually great. They've got it laid out with all the different antennas.
They've got the USB. It looks like there's some terminals here
that you can tag into, power. It's not something you normally see.
Like if you buy a Wi-Fi router, they're not gonna show you photos of the circuit board
inside of it, so it's pretty cool. I guess at this point, we should plug it in and try it,
right?
There we go. Oh, the little spot in the front. It has a little light.
See that? Status indicator, cool. It's nice that it comes with an Ethernet cable,
especially as a travel product. A flat pack, very small Ethernet cable like this.
Kind of perfect. It would be cool if there was a way for this Ethernet cable to store inside the thing,
but I guess you could just wrap it around it or throw it in your bag, whatever.
I don't have an external hard drive, but I do have this little flash drive, so that'll be our stand in.
Yep. And now we're pretty much fully connected. I just gotta get a USB-C to Ethernet
because I have a MacBook and we all know how that goes.
Before we hardware, I wanna connect to the Wi-Fi and see how that works.
Oh, interesting, by default, there's a 5G network
and, well, it doesn't say what this one is. I don't know if this one is a combo
and then there's a separate 5G network, or if it's 2.4 and 5,
I'm gonna assume that it's a 2.4 and a 5G network, which I actually usually prefer.
Yeah, there's the SSID and there's a key. It's good the default password isn't like the password.
I mean, companies haven't done that in a long time, but the password is printed on the bottom.
All right, we're connected. Oh boy, the upstream from this little travel router
is a full one gig fiber connection and I'm on my phone.
I haven't configured anything. I don't know what the default settings are at all.
I haven't even opened the admin page, but let's just do a little speed test for fun.
Damn boy, getting that crispy 800 down.
I was expecting a little router like this to struggle a bit, but getting 750 down, 650 up over Wi-Fi
on something this small is pretty cool. I mean, maybe I'll go over here if you still see me.
I'll have to shout. So I'm like probably 13 feet away, let's say 600 down, 650.
Okay, now I'm probably 30 feet away.
We've got a bunch of duveteen and clothes and metal
and like, I'll stand behind the wall here.
This is a lot trickier of a circumstance.
Not bad, still cracking 500 down.
Upload is a little bit lower, looking like high 300s.
Pretty good. Now we can get into a little bit more of the fun stuff.
I wanna show you guys the web panel for this thing because it might not be what you expect.
It's not like a gaming router
where they have a fancy web panel thing.
It's just OpenWRT, which is actually really nice.
For the uninitiated, OpenWRT is an open source network
routing operating system based on Linux.
So, I mean, in theory, this thing should be supported
for a super long time to come. Even if GLInet stopped producing firmware for it,
I'm sure you could get the open source OpenWRT version and just install that.
It does look like they've made some customizations to it.
We've got like this cool diagram up here. Does this have multi-wan?
Let's see, repeater. Multi-wan, oh, cool.
How can you, oh, interesting. Really, can you use this as a Wi-Fi repeater
and connected to Ethernet at the same time and tethering?
Oh, wow, you totally can. Okay, cellular, you can plug in a USB cellular modem
and use this as your Wi-Fi, that's pretty cool. I do wanna try repeater.
Hey, look at that, okay, LMG, let's try that.
Look at that, that's pretty cool. We're connected to LMG5 and to the Ethernet.
Let's try the failover, because that's how I'm set up right now. My laptop is just connected to this Ethernet cable.
Wi-Fi's turned off. This little guy is connected to that one gig fiber link
and then our office Wi-Fi. So if I unplug the one gig fiber box,
it detected right away. I didn't even drop a single ping.
That's pretty good. I mean, sometimes failover like this,
it can take a little while. My ping's hopping up a little bit, but that's...
I mean, I'm connected to Wi-Fi, so that makes sense right now. And if I connect back to Ethernet,
the ping should stay pretty consistent. Okay, I lost one ping, switching back to the Ethernet,
but that's totally reasonable. I don't know if I would need this,
but I'm sure there are people out there that would. I mean, I can definitely see this failover
being used with a cellular puck.
Maybe if you had like Starlink, because you're out in the boonies
and then you had like a second satellite connection, or if you had like a Starlink and a cellular,
or if you had, you're at like a convention and they have Wi-Fi, but it kind of sucks.
And then you also have cellular, but it kind of sucks because there's so many people.
Well, why not use both, right? It's cool that the web interface
updates pretty much immediately.
I mean, it realized that the Ethernet had been plugged in and it is requesting a DHCP address like immediately.
Let's see if I turn the Wi-Fi off.
Okay, I disabled Wi-Fi. Didn't drop a packet either.
Pretty cool. Oh, also we have our cable thing now, so let's try tethering too, why not?
When was the last time anyone tethered with a cable? I kind of forgot that that was even an option.
Tethering, oh, look at that. Pop right up, ETH2, iOS.
No way, that's so cool. Disconnect the Ethernet.
Okay, I lost one ping and now we're using
the cellular connection from my phone over USB. I'm sure all the open WRT people in the comments are like,
this is so normal and easy. Like in open sense, it takes so long.
It takes like 10 seconds for it to realize. I guess by default it's because we have it set to,
it wants 100% packet loss and there's like a period that it tests over and that's probably part of why,
but it works shockingly well. Over in the Wi-Fi settings, it's pretty standard affair.
You can change the name, you can change the security type. Does support WPA3, which is cool.
You can change your SSID if it's shown. You can change the modes that are available.
You can switch the channel width, the channel. You can enable a guest Wi-Fi name if you want.
We've got a client list here. We can see network acceleration is enabled.
Client speed or abnormal. Client speed limit is not working. Network acceleration reduces CPU load
and speeds up traffic packet forwarding, but can conflict with some features.
This is hardware acceleration. Yeah, it says right there, hardware acceleration. That makes sense.
So these speeds and traffics might not be accurate
because when you enable hardware acceleration, things like that get a little bit harder to have function,
but I can see all of the devices. I can see their IP addresses and in theory, the speed.
What else we got in here? Applications, plugins, whoa.
Plugins look to be the standard open WRT package manager.
We've got dynamic DNS, which can be helpful, good cloud.
Check their stats in real time, set up routers remotely, operate routers and batch
and monitor connected devices. Oh cool, I guess if you had like a fleet of these little routers and all of your business guys
that are out on travel, take them with them, then you can kind of monitor and manage them remotely
with a service that's hosted by them, which is cool. We've got network storage.
Okay, this one we can actually try. I've got a USB stick.
File services, let's turn on Samba, which is like the Linux version of SMB.
Ah, this is a Windows install disk. So this might be a little screwy,
but let's say boot is gonna be the folder.
You should set up a user if you're gonna have network storage
available on your network. I'm just doing it like this to make it easier for me to connect.
Guest, connect. Hey, look at that.
AdGuard Home. It's a network-wide software for ad blocking.
Yeah, okay, I can just enable that. So what, now I have ad blocking?
It's really that easy. Obviously as content creators, we'd love if you didn't use ad blocking
since it pays the bills, but in theory, I am now ad blocking.
Look at that, blocked by filters, 144.
Great, it's working, that was easy. If you're into that, there you go.
I might forgive you for using ad block on LTT if you were subscribed to Flowplain.
We've got parental controls. You can add profiles for each device it looks like.
Oh yeah, I don't have any children with me right now, aside from me.
Oh, it's got zero tier built-in. This wasn't in the notes. And tail scale.
Zero tier and tail scale are peer-to-peer VPNs,
which are super cool. So you can just join this to your zero tier or tail net,
just like that. That's so cool. Firewall, that's pretty standard.
You can port forward if you want. We've got the multi-wan we talked about before.
The LAN side, we can edit the router IP address. It's a little weird that it's only the middle digit though.
Oh, and okay, you click advance, you can change this to whatever you want. You can configure your DNS servers,
create your own private network. You can put it in access point mode where this is literally just a Wi-Fi box
and the WAN would be like an in from a router.
That's, I imagine a pretty common use case.
You can just set it up to be a Wi-Fi extender or a Wi-Fi extender in WDS mode.
Hey, there's a little stats page, that's cute. We're using almost all of our half a Gigabyte RAM,
although most of it is cache right now. You can see our storage, we've got 154 megabytes left on the internal storage.
There's a firmware updater. Oh, you can turn the LED off if you don't want it.
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.
Yeah, I don't want UTC, I want America Vancouver, perfect.
The toggle button, ah, it's configurable. That's why they don't say what it does.
You can set it to toggle ad guard home on and off.
You can set it to toggle your open VPN on and off, tour or wire guard, which actually brings me
to a very good point of kind of who is this made for?
And one of the use cases that I could definitely see
is having this be a VPN client.
So say you're traveling with a coworker or even just by yourself,
you could configure this as an open VPN or wire guard client for your works VPN.
And then when you connect to it, it's kind of just like you're at the office.
It drops you onto that VPN network and you can access anything you would normally access
on your VPN without having to run it on your laptop
or run it on your phone or if you have some other device that isn't easily configurable,
you can drop it right on there and you don't have to do any configuration.
It's just on immediately and say, well, now I wanna be off my work network.
I hit my toggle switch and bam, I'm off the work network.
And it's not even just a work VPN. You can use say like a kind of a more privacy VPN
like a Nord VPN or PIA where you're just using that to obfuscate your IP address.
This can run that for you. And again, so you don't have to configure it
on the individual devices. So why don't we try connecting to one of these?
We're now connected to a remote wire guard server,
this IP, which you're not gonna be able to see is correct for that server.
And if we run a speed test, obviously this is gonna be way slower
than the full speed of this WAN because running a VPN and handling that encryption,
it's a lot of processing power to do that. Right now we're getting a download speed of 150 megabit
and we'll see our upload is around 150 as well.
They rate on their website for wire guard. They can do a max of 300 and open VPN a max of 150.
I haven't tested that wire guard VPN with any other clients.
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.
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
and your mileage will definitely vary. Man, there's actually a lot of settings in here.
You can set it to only use the VPN for certain domains.
You can set it to use the VPN only on certain devices
or on certain VLANs. It's pretty damn cool.
I don't know what else there is to say about this thing. It's cute and small, fits in your pocket.
It's got a lot of cool features like multi-WAN and failover
seems to rip pretty good and it's not crazy expensive.
It's 119 on their website right now. And if you use our coupon code, which will be right here
and also in the description, you can get yourself a discount
if you pick one of these things up. I might just put in my pocket and go away,
but not before telling you to subscribe, like this video and watch more ShortCircuit.