WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.120 This is the GL Inet Barrel AX, and they've sponsored today's video 00:00:04.120 --> 00:00:08.200 to take a look at this cute, cute little router. 00:00:08.200 --> 00:00:11.160 I mean, oh my God, it's so small. 00:00:12.120 --> 00:00:16.320 And that's for good reason. Man, it's literally, this could be totally pocket-sized. 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, 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. 00:00:25.920 --> 00:00:28.880 Okay, I mean, here, let's do the pocket test. 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. 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 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. 00:00:40.920 --> 00:00:44.600 We've got a let's get started thing. That's helpful. 00:00:44.600 --> 00:00:48.520 Wi-Fi routers can be a little bit tricky in that sometimes. 00:00:48.520 --> 00:00:51.560 We've got the little power brick. This thing is really low power. 00:00:51.560 --> 00:00:55.400 What is it? 5.3 amps, so a 15-watt power brick, 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, 00:01:00.800 --> 00:01:04.680 which normally kinda feels like a cop-out when you get all of them. 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. 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. 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. 00:01:19.400 --> 00:01:23.160 This is just a normal USB-C power brick thing. 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. 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. 00:01:34.400 --> 00:01:37.920 From my understanding, you can change these around a little bit. 00:01:37.920 --> 00:01:41.040 We've got a USB 3.0 port for sharing storage. 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 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. 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. 00:01:56.240 --> 00:01:58.880 What else we got? Man, that's pretty much it. There's not a lot. 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. 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. 00:02:07.640 --> 00:02:11.560 It's Wi-Fi 6 compatible, so dual band 2.4 and 5 gigahertz. 00:02:11.560 --> 00:02:14.880 It supports DFS channels if you're in a congested area 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. 00:02:18.720 --> 00:02:24.000 You got a small apartment, DFS channels, which are using channels that are normally 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:29.280 populated by radar and stuff. It can use those channels to have less congestions, 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. 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. 00:02:37.880 --> 00:02:43.400 And I realized, look at this. They have like full board shots. 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. 00:02:48.040 --> 00:02:52.440 They've got the USB. It looks like there's some terminals here 00:02:52.440 --> 00:02:56.920 that you can tag into, power. It's not something you normally see. 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 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, 00:03:04.600 --> 00:03:05.440 right? 00:03:07.840 --> 00:03:11.240 There we go. Oh, the little spot in the front. It has a little light. 00:03:11.240 --> 00:03:14.480 See that? Status indicator, cool. It's nice that it comes with an Ethernet cable, 00:03:14.480 --> 00:03:20.960 especially as a travel product. A flat pack, very small Ethernet cable like this. 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, 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. 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. 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 00:03:38.400 --> 00:03:41.880 because I have a MacBook and we all know how that goes. 00:03:41.880 --> 00:03:45.440 Before we hardware, I wanna connect to the Wi-Fi and see how that works. 00:03:45.440 --> 00:03:48.960 Oh, interesting, by default, there's a 5G network 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 00:03:52.720 --> 00:03:56.680 and then there's a separate 5G network, or if it's 2.4 and 5, 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. 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. 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. 00:04:11.680 --> 00:04:16.760 All right, we're connected. Oh boy, the upstream from this little travel router 00:04:16.760 --> 00:04:20.640 is a full one gig fiber connection and I'm on my phone. 00:04:20.640 --> 00:04:27.400 I haven't configured anything. I don't know what the default settings are at all. 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. 00:04:33.000 --> 00:04:37.400 Damn boy, getting that crispy 800 down. 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 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. 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. 00:04:56.720 --> 00:05:01.000 Okay, now I'm probably 30 feet away. 00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:04.720 We've got a bunch of duveteen and clothes and metal 00:05:04.720 --> 00:05:08.040 and like, I'll stand behind the wall here. 00:05:08.040 --> 00:05:11.320 This is a lot trickier of a circumstance. 00:05:11.320 --> 00:05:15.560 Not bad, still cracking 500 down. 00:05:15.560 --> 00:05:19.440 Upload is a little bit lower, looking like high 300s. 00:05:19.440 --> 00:05:22.560 Pretty good. Now we can get into a little bit more of the fun stuff. 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. 00:05:27.360 --> 00:05:31.460 It's not like a gaming router 00:05:31.460 --> 00:05:34.560 where they have a fancy web panel thing. 00:05:34.560 --> 00:05:37.960 It's just OpenWRT, which is actually really nice. 00:05:37.960 --> 00:05:41.520 For the uninitiated, OpenWRT is an open source network 00:05:41.520 --> 00:05:44.960 routing operating system based on Linux. 00:05:44.960 --> 00:05:49.440 So, I mean, in theory, this thing should be supported 00:05:49.440 --> 00:05:54.120 for a super long time to come. Even if GLInet stopped producing firmware for it, 00:05:54.120 --> 00:05:58.040 I'm sure you could get the open source OpenWRT version and just install that. 00:05:58.040 --> 00:06:01.400 It does look like they've made some customizations to it. 00:06:01.400 --> 00:06:05.400 We've got like this cool diagram up here. Does this have multi-wan? 00:06:05.400 --> 00:06:09.240 Let's see, repeater. Multi-wan, oh, cool. 00:06:09.240 --> 00:06:14.680 How can you, oh, interesting. Really, can you use this as a Wi-Fi repeater 00:06:14.680 --> 00:06:18.960 and connected to Ethernet at the same time and tethering? 00:06:18.960 --> 00:06:23.720 Oh, wow, you totally can. Okay, cellular, you can plug in a USB cellular modem 00:06:23.720 --> 00:06:27.960 and use this as your Wi-Fi, that's pretty cool. I do wanna try repeater. 00:06:27.960 --> 00:06:31.040 Hey, look at that, okay, LMG, let's try that. 00:06:31.040 --> 00:06:38.160 Look at that, that's pretty cool. We're connected to LMG5 and to the Ethernet. 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. 00:06:43.160 --> 00:06:48.520 Wi-Fi's turned off. This little guy is connected to that one gig fiber link 00:06:48.520 --> 00:06:55.040 and then our office Wi-Fi. So if I unplug the one gig fiber box, 00:06:55.080 --> 00:06:58.360 it detected right away. I didn't even drop a single ping. 00:06:58.360 --> 00:07:02.080 That's pretty good. I mean, sometimes failover like this, 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... 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, 00:07:10.720 --> 00:07:15.760 the ping should stay pretty consistent. Okay, I lost one ping, switching back to the Ethernet, 00:07:15.760 --> 00:07:20.000 but that's totally reasonable. I don't know if I would need this, 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 00:07:23.680 --> 00:07:26.800 being used with a cellular puck. 00:07:26.800 --> 00:07:29.800 Maybe if you had like Starlink, because you're out in the boonies 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, 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. 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. 00:07:45.320 --> 00:07:48.520 Well, why not use both, right? It's cool that the web interface 00:07:48.520 --> 00:07:50.240 updates pretty much immediately. 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. 00:07:58.120 --> 00:07:59.880 Let's see if I turn the Wi-Fi off. 00:08:01.760 --> 00:08:06.600 Okay, I disabled Wi-Fi. Didn't drop a packet either. 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? 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. 00:08:16.380 --> 00:08:19.400 Tethering, oh, look at that. Pop right up, ETH2, iOS. 00:08:19.400 --> 00:08:23.320 No way, that's so cool. Disconnect the Ethernet. 00:08:23.320 --> 00:08:26.760 Okay, I lost one ping and now we're using 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, 00:08:31.840 --> 00:08:36.600 this is so normal and easy. Like in open sense, it takes so long. 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, 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, 00:08:46.480 --> 00:08:51.280 but it works shockingly well. Over in the Wi-Fi settings, it's pretty standard affair. 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. 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. 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. 00:09:06.600 --> 00:09:11.760 We've got a client list here. We can see network acceleration is enabled. 00:09:11.760 --> 00:09:16.520 Client speed or abnormal. Client speed limit is not working. Network acceleration reduces CPU load 00:09:16.520 --> 00:09:19.760 and speeds up traffic packet forwarding, but can conflict with some features. 00:09:19.760 --> 00:09:23.480 This is hardware acceleration. Yeah, it says right there, hardware acceleration. That makes sense. 00:09:23.480 --> 00:09:26.600 So these speeds and traffics might not be accurate 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, 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. 00:09:37.600 --> 00:09:41.080 What else we got in here? Applications, plugins, whoa. 00:09:41.080 --> 00:09:44.840 Plugins look to be the standard open WRT package manager. 00:09:44.840 --> 00:09:48.360 We've got dynamic DNS, which can be helpful, good cloud. 00:09:48.360 --> 00:09:51.600 Check their stats in real time, set up routers remotely, operate routers and batch 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 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 00:10:02.680 --> 00:10:06.080 with a service that's hosted by them, which is cool. We've got network storage. 00:10:06.080 --> 00:10:09.160 Okay, this one we can actually try. I've got a USB stick. 00:10:09.160 --> 00:10:13.800 File services, let's turn on Samba, which is like the Linux version of SMB. 00:10:13.800 --> 00:10:17.000 Ah, this is a Windows install disk. So this might be a little screwy, 00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:20.040 but let's say boot is gonna be the folder. 00:10:20.040 --> 00:10:23.040 You should set up a user if you're gonna have network storage 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. 00:10:27.480 --> 00:10:31.560 Guest, connect. Hey, look at that. 00:10:31.560 --> 00:10:34.600 AdGuard Home. It's a network-wide software for ad blocking. 00:10:34.600 --> 00:10:37.680 Yeah, okay, I can just enable that. So what, now I have ad blocking? 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 00:10:43.280 --> 00:10:46.760 since it pays the bills, but in theory, I am now ad blocking. 00:10:46.760 --> 00:10:50.320 Look at that, blocked by filters, 144. 00:10:50.320 --> 00:10:53.800 Great, it's working, that was easy. If you're into that, there you go. 00:10:53.800 --> 00:10:58.440 I might forgive you for using ad block on LTT if you were subscribed to Flowplain. 00:10:58.440 --> 00:11:03.400 We've got parental controls. You can add profiles for each device it looks like. 00:11:03.400 --> 00:11:06.720 Oh yeah, I don't have any children with me right now, aside from me. 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. 00:11:10.080 --> 00:11:13.200 Zero tier and tail scale are peer-to-peer VPNs, 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, 00:11:17.240 --> 00:11:21.360 just like that. That's so cool. Firewall, that's pretty standard. 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. 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. 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, 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 00:11:40.640 --> 00:11:43.640 and the WAN would be like an in from a router. 00:11:43.640 --> 00:11:47.240 That's, I imagine a pretty common use case. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 00:12:12.800 --> 00:12:16.140 Yeah, I don't want UTC, I want America Vancouver, perfect. 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. 00:12:20.740 --> 00:12:24.260 You can set it to toggle ad guard home on and off. 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 00:12:29.140 --> 00:12:33.040 to a very good point of kind of who is this made for? 00:12:33.040 --> 00:12:36.100 And one of the use cases that I could definitely see 00:12:36.100 --> 00:12:39.100 is having this be a VPN client. 00:12:39.100 --> 00:12:42.900 So say you're traveling with a coworker or even just by yourself, 00:12:42.900 --> 00:12:48.500 you could configure this as an open VPN or wire guard client for your works VPN. 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. 00:12:52.420 --> 00:12:56.860 It drops you onto that VPN network and you can access anything you would normally access 00:12:56.860 --> 00:12:59.900 on your VPN without having to run it on your laptop 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, 00:13:04.540 --> 00:13:08.220 you can drop it right on there and you don't have to do any configuration. 00:13:08.220 --> 00:13:12.740 It's just on immediately and say, well, now I wanna be off my work network. 00:13:12.740 --> 00:13:16.620 I hit my toggle switch and bam, I'm off the work network. 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 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. 00:13:29.540 --> 00:13:32.860 This can run that for you. And again, so you don't have to configure it 00:13:32.860 --> 00:13:37.100 on the individual devices. So why don't we try connecting to one of these? 00:13:37.100 --> 00:13:40.260 We're now connected to a remote wire guard server, 00:13:40.260 --> 00:13:43.980 this IP, which you're not gonna be able to see is correct for that server. 00:13:43.980 --> 00:13:47.180 And if we run a speed test, obviously this is gonna be way slower 00:13:47.180 --> 00:13:52.100 than the full speed of this WAN because running a VPN and handling that encryption, 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 00:13:57.700 --> 00:14:02.620 and we'll see our upload is around 150 as well. 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. 00:14:08.540 --> 00:14:11.740 I haven't tested that wire guard VPN with any other clients. 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. 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 00:14:21.700 --> 00:14:26.300 and your mileage will definitely vary. Man, there's actually a lot of settings in here. 00:14:26.300 --> 00:14:30.980 You can set it to only use the VPN for certain domains. 00:14:30.980 --> 00:14:34.740 You can set it to use the VPN only on certain devices 00:14:34.740 --> 00:14:37.740 or on certain VLANs. It's pretty damn cool. 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. 00:14:41.820 --> 00:14:45.580 It's got a lot of cool features like multi-WAN and failover 00:14:45.860 --> 00:14:49.820 seems to rip pretty good and it's not crazy expensive. 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 00:14:54.980 --> 00:14:58.220 and also in the description, you can get yourself a discount 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, 00:15:02.020 --> 00:15:06.380 but not before telling you to subscribe, like this video and watch more ShortCircuit.