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If you can afford it, go one better. I started out buying expensive home Wi-Fi routers, and I now have a box of expensive home routers I've decommissioned beca
by alias_neo 5y ago
If you can afford it, go one better.
I started out buying expensive home Wi-Fi routers, and I now have a box of expensive home routers I've decommissioned because they have vulnerabilities and stopped receiving updates. Probably well over ~£1000-2000 spent on them over the past ~decade.
Next I switched to separate Router/Switch/AP and started with a Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch 8 POE, EdgeRouter Lite 3 and an AP-AC-Pro. Later I added a EdgeSwitch 24.
Recently my EdgeRouter kicked the bucket, and wanting to be entirely free from manufacturer updates so I bought a Protectli box, flashed it with Coreboot (instead of AMIBIOS) and installed pfSense. I still use the AP-AC-Pro for now but will look for more open WiFi AP options once that dies or I move from my London apartment to a bigger home.
I say "if you can afford it" because the Protectli box came in at just over £500 once RAM and SSD were added (I got the i3 model), the AP-AC-Pro is ~£120 (IIRC) and the EdgeSwitch another ~£150. This isn't "reasonably" priced equipment for home use, nor would I recommend Ubiquiti of late, but it's working well for me at the moment.
- spaniard89277 5y agoHave you tried Turris routers?
- alias_neo 5y agoI have not. I considered one when I was replacing the EdgeRouter but I'm a firm believer in separation of concerns, I didn't want my router to be handling my WiFi or doing the switching. It would have been my top choice had I wanted to stick to an "all in one".
- wooben 5y agoI would recommend installing Proxmox on the Protectli bare metal and running pfsense (I prefer opnsense) in a VM. Then you can run your unifi controller in a container on the same device. The i3 should be able to handle that, and you can use Proxmox to share some USB drives over NFS.
- alias_neo 5y agoThanks for the suggestion but "separation of concerns" is key for me; I also wouldn't want extra software running on my edge, even containerised. I have plenty of hardware (and several Kubernetes clusters) inside my network to run software workloads on. For storage I built my "NAS" in the Silverstone CS381 (https://www.servethehome.com/silverstone-cs381-8-bay-matx-case-shown/ https://www.servethehome.com/silverstone-cs381-8-bay-matx-ca...) with an LSI HBA, Ryzen 9 3900X / 128GB RAM, 6 Intel NICs, 2 NVM.e SSDs + 1 SATA SSD for Proxmox and a bunch of HGST Ultrastar He10s as ZFS mirrors. I run the Unifi controller in a container on there. Before the pfSense Protectli I was also running AdGuard Home in a container (which replaced Pi-Hole on a Pi) but Unbound + pfBlockerNG is more capable. Re: pfSense / OPNSense; I was running OPNSense initially, but had some issues, I'm likely to go back if they're resolved; I find myself falling on the OPNSense side of the politics there.