The Cheapest Soft Router Ever – Installing LEDE on Snail Galaxy B Version

The origin of Snail Galaxy is not something I will elaborate on, as it was introduced in previous articles. Why choose the B version as the hardware for a soft router? Of course, it is because this version has two network card interfaces. Although the official claims it is dual gigabit, the first batch of “pioneering” users found that only one port works at gigabit speed. Later, through the research of a certain expert, it was discovered that short-circuiting the two resistors of the network card chip can solve the issue of only one port being gigabit, perfectly fixing the dual gigabit issue.

If you are relatively skilled with a soldering iron, you can short-circuit it yourself, or you can buy a soldering pen on Taobao, which is simple and easy to use. The short-circuit points are shown in the image below (this image is referenced from someone else; if there is infringement, please contact me to delete it.):

To save trouble, I directly asked the seller to help with the short-circuit (I bought it on Xianyu).

OpenWRT is a Linux-based router system developed by Linksys (acquired by Cisco in 2003). After becoming open-source, it has been widely used to flash onto other wireless routers on the market.

Here, we are using the Koolshare version of LEDE, which features a built-in software (plugin) center: Cool Software. The software center has about 60 various plugins that enrich the functionality of LEDE. Even if the software you can’t find in the Cool Software, you can install it offline. For example, a previously online installable scientific internet access plugin (if you know, you know~~~~~~; if you don’t, you can search for it) is no longer found in the Cool Software, but fortunately, some experts have backed up the installation files, which can be found through searching.

LEDE can be installed on X86 architecture hardware, fully utilizing hardware performance, and its performance far exceeds that of home routers.

In summary, through the LEDE routing system, you can truly take control of the router, install various functional plugins, customize various settings, and most importantly, you can install scientific internet access plugins to enable all family devices to “study abroad”.

The basic configuration of the Snail Galaxy C version is: CPU j1900 2.0GHz; memory 4G; hard disk unnamed 16G SSD; network port 2 1000M. Simply using it to install the LEDE soft router is a bit overkill. To fully exploit the performance of this machine, we decided to use virtualization, that is, to install virtualization software and run LEDE in a virtual machine. In the future, we can also virtualize other soft routing systems like iKuai, ROS, etc., which can be more fun and achieve multiple uses of one machine.

(1) PVE, which stands for Proxmox VE. Why not use the famous VMware EXSI? Mainly because PVE is free, open-source, and occupies very little system resources.

With these plugins, you can freely tinker with the router and transform it into the functionality you want to achieve.