Freedombox allows me to use the Internet according to my ideas

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1

I would like to mention two things.
First, that the Freedombox (Pioneer) requires a second network card should be made clearer already during setup. Setting up an (open source hardware) USB-WIFI stick has taken a lot of research work for me.
Second, I’m worried because SD cards don’t have a long lifespan. Is it recommended to make a copy of the whole sd card regularly? What if the SD card broke? Is it possible to apply all my settings from the backup files to a newly installed image and a new SD card to make the system run again?
A cloud at a large provider offers great security, how can I achieve this at home even close to my Freedombox?

Overall Impressions
Freedombox is a very useful combination of fantastic tools and excellently preconfigured

  • i run Radicale, Syncthing, VPN, Privoxy, Matrix, Mumble, Quassel and TT RSS
  • installation of all apps without any problems, unless due to my faults
  • i like the SYSTEM area

I would like to see a more detailed description of the possibilities for personal use for the programms.

  • (apps you like to see in future) Mailserver, Nextcloud
  • (how to improve existing app) Video server in Matrix Synapse? Probably hungry for resources

Pioneer Freedombox 19.20

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@MikaelB Could you let us know about your use case with the USB-WIFI? Are you using FreedomBox as a replacement for your wifi router?

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Yes, I use my FreedomBox as a router. My first attempts with an Asus USB WIFI did not work even though I had installed the nonfree driver for the Realtek chip. The WPA suplicant did not want to connect. Then I experimented with Freedombox on an old Aspier One netbook. Now I had two network devices and the netbook worked as a router without any problems. Then I bought an open source hardware USB WIFI stick with AR9271 chipset and now I use my FreedomboxPioneer as a router for mobile phone, desktop computer, laptop, Kodi Media Center and network printer. I feel safer with the Internal and External Network Card. The output of journalctl -f is unfortunately

freedombox wpa_supplicant[313]: wlx6cfdb9aac4fb: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-FAILED ret=-95 retry=1

repeated every second, so, maybe something is not perfect but it works. The Privoxy protect me from Advertises and I use Bind DNS server

1 Like
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Did you do any documentation on the AAO? Got one here somewhere, but I am not very technically advanced.

5

It was easy. I’m also more of a user than a developer. I downloaded an image (32-bit x86 (i386)) from https://freedombox.org/download/stable/ and loaded it onto an SD card with Balena Etcher and booted the Aspire One from it. On this way I had the two network interfaces that you need to operate the Freedombox as a router. I’m not quite sure if I have installed the non free WIFI firmware (firmware-misc-nonfree), I would have to check that first but the network configuration was trouble-free

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I also using Asus router but a sometimes unknown technical issue occurred with that router. I also faced similar problems but as a non-technical person could not be solved that problem. Recently I faced a problem that was sometimes asus router login not working and for that reason could not get internet connection.