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honest question, who do you trust that provides either high end residential or SMB type networking gear that works well? The average residential stuff is all ga

honest question, who do you trust that provides either high end residential or SMB type networking gear that works well? The average residential stuff is all garbage and I was looking into unifi because seems to work better but I'm open to suggestions.

aftbit 3y ago
I personally run a bunch of obsolete Aruba, Juniper, and Ruckus gear at home. It works pretty well, doesn't cost very much, generally doesn't require licenses or cloud, and supports every feature under the sun. The only problem is power consumption, but I don't mind burning ~200W on my whole house's network infrastructure.
- freedomben 3y ago
  This is a great way to go if you don't mind the power consumption and/or learning how to administer them. You can buy used Juniper equipment that went for 4 to 5 figures when it was new, for dirt cheap (2 figures). Still plenty sufficient for home use. If you've never done Juniper before it can be a bit of a learning curve, but the equipment is really solid.
freedomben 3y ago
This is a really hard time to be in that market. I built my own "mesh" system by deploying 3 separate routers in bridge mode, connected via ethernet (lucky that house was pre-wired). We moved to a house that didn't have that and I used powerline adapters which worked well enough, but once wifi 6 came and the true mesh systems like Google Wifi and Eero put together a system that has much better handoff (by coordinating), open source really just hasn't kept up. The powerline solution kind of sucks because it caps out for me at 20 Mbps (which is very disappointing when scp-ing a file over the LAN!). I've heard people able to get 200 Mbps through powerline, but I haven't been successful. I built a system that just used three routers each with a slightly different SSID, and a script on my laptop that would switch it to the one with the most power once it hit a certain differential threshold. That was honestly my favorite system, and what I plan to do again once my current system retires. My current system is a Protectli 4-port firewall appliance that is running AlmaLinux. It gets CGNATed by my ISP (Starlink) but I set up Tailscale (Headscale) and don't really have any issues now from CGNAT. Cockpit plus plugins provides me a good GUI, although I prefer to just SSH and use the CLI. I have two "wireless access points", one is a Linksys WRT3200ACM: AC3200 (open source edition). It's good, not great. The other is a (swallow) Google wifi. The Google wifi adds a layer of NAT in order to provide mesh. You can avoid that by putting it in hub mode but you lose wireless handoff if you use that. I've been pretty happy with that system for several years, but I'm still on the lookout for something more open that isn't a major downgrade on speed/reliability. I can more or less hot swap any WAP into place since most of the brains/config is in my Almalinux router.

aftbit 3y ago

I personally run a bunch of obsolete Aruba, Juniper, and Ruckus gear at home. It works pretty well, doesn't cost very much, generally doesn't require licenses or cloud, and supports every feature under the sun. The only problem is power consumption, but I don't mind burning ~200W on my whole house's network infrastructure.

freedomben 3y ago
This is a great way to go if you don't mind the power consumption and/or learning how to administer them. You can buy used Juniper equipment that went for 4 to 5 figures when it was new, for dirt cheap (2 figures). Still plenty sufficient for home use. If you've never done Juniper before it can be a bit of a learning curve, but the equipment is really solid.

freedomben 3y ago

This is a really hard time to be in that market. I built my own "mesh" system by deploying 3 separate routers in bridge mode, connected via ethernet (lucky that house was pre-wired). We moved to a house that didn't have that and I used powerline adapters which worked well enough, but once wifi 6 came and the true mesh systems like Google Wifi and Eero put together a system that has much better handoff (by coordinating), open source really just hasn't kept up. The powerline solution kind of sucks because it caps out for me at 20 Mbps (which is very disappointing when scp-ing a file over the LAN!). I've heard people able to get 200 Mbps through powerline, but I haven't been successful. I built a system that just used three routers each with a slightly different SSID, and a script on my laptop that would switch it to the one with the most power once it hit a certain differential threshold. That was honestly my favorite system, and what I plan to do again once my current system retires. My current system is a Protectli 4-port firewall appliance that is running AlmaLinux. It gets CGNATed by my ISP (Starlink) but I set up Tailscale (Headscale) and don't really have any issues now from CGNAT. Cockpit plus plugins provides me a good GUI, although I prefer to just SSH and use the CLI. I have two "wireless access points", one is a Linksys WRT3200ACM: AC3200 (open source edition). It's good, not great. The other is a (swallow) Google wifi. The Google wifi adds a layer of NAT in order to provide mesh. You can avoid that by putting it in hub mode but you lose wireless handoff if you use that. I've been pretty happy with that system for several years, but I'm still on the lookout for something more open that isn't a major downgrade on speed/reliability. I can more or less hot swap any WAP into place since most of the brains/config is in my Almalinux router.