Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I didn’t know I needed this – GL.iNet Beryl AX”.
This is the glinet 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. It 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 kind of makes sense.
Okay, I mean here: let’s: 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 uh? 5 volt, 3 amps, so a 15 watt power brick, but the Box itself is a Max of 8 watts. It even comes with all of the little power adapter things which normally kind of 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 want to have, while 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 USBC power. Brick thing you just need a USB brick that can do 5 volt 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 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 for an apartment. If you want, you got a small apartment, DFS channels which are using channels that are normally uh 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 you. If you buy a Wi-Fi, router they’re not going to 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. 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 we’ll that’ll be our stand in yep and now we’re pretty much fully connected. I just got to get a USBC to ethernet, because I have a Macbook and uh. We all know how that goes before we Hardware. I want to connect to the Wi-Fi and see how that works.
Oh interesting, by default, there’s a 5G Network and uh. 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 gon na assume that it’s a 2.4 and a 5 gig 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 a password.
I mean companies haven’t done that in a long time, but the 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 um.
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 I’ll go over here. Can you still see me I’ll have to shout so I’m like probably 13 feet away? Let’S say: uh 600 down 650.. Okay, now I’m probably 30 feet away. We’Ve got a we’ve, got a bunch of duveting and clothes and metal and, like I’ll Stand, 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. We’Re looking like high 300s pretty good now we can get into a little bit more of the fun stuff. I want to show you guys the web panel for this thing, because it might not be what you expect. It’S not you know.
Like a you know, gaming router, where they have a fancy web panel thing, it’s just opened wrt, which is actually really nice for the uninitiated. Open wrt 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 GLI net stopped producing firmware for it, I’m sure you could get the open source open, wrt version and just install that it does look like they’ve made some customizations To it, um 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 uh cellular you can plug in a USB cellular modem and use this as your Wi-Fi, that’s pretty cool. I do want to 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 is 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 Pain’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 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 star link 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 um 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 popped right up, E2. 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 sounds normal and easy again open sense. It takes so long.
It takes like 10 seconds for it to realize um. 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 uh 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 um. You can change your SS ID. If it’s shown you can change the modes that are available. You can switch the channel with 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 Okay, 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 through stats in real time setup, routers, remotely operated, routers and batch for monitor connected devices.
Oh cool, I guess, if you had like a fleet of these little routers and all of your 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 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 let’s say boot is going to be the folder. You should set up a user if you’re going to 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 at guard home is 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 Adblock on LTT. If you were subscribed to flowplane 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 got the multi-wan. We talked about before the land 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 Advanced. 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 of ram, although most of it is cash 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 openvpn on and off Tor or wireguard, 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 co-worker or even just by yourself. You could configure this as an open, VPN or wireguard client for your Worx 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 want to 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 uh, you know like a nordvpn or a Pia, where you’re just using that to obfuscate. Your IP address this can run that for you and again, and 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, wireguard server? This IP, which you’re not going to be able to see, is correct for that server if we run a speed test. Obviously, this is going to be way slower than the full speed of this win 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 just around 150 as well. They rate on their website for wireger. They can do a Max of 300 and open DP at a Max of 150..
I haven’t tested that wireguard VPN with any other client, so I don’t know if that’s the limitation here on their website. They do say they can do about 300 300 through wireguard 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 it’s cute and small fits in your pocket. It’S got a lot of cool features like multi-wan and failover and 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 short circuit.
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