Long time lurker, first time poster and all that… hopping to get some feedback from people who know more about networking hardware than I do :D.
Main goal is to upgrade my networking gear to allow for VLANs, multiple SSIDs, hopefully a more reliable connection than what I have and overall newer toys to play with :P.
My current setup
Vodafone Germany cablemodem.
OPNSense instance as DHCP, firewall, gateway.
2 ASUS routers as switches and AP and as wireless mesh.
Its a small-ish apartment, roughly 65m2. 3 rooms + kitchen and bathroom. Wooden doors and pretty solid walls.
There are mainly 2 “areas”. My office has the modem, opnsense and one of the ASUS routers. That has my desktop, NAS and all the home lab gear.
The other area is the living room. There’s another ASUS router there with the gaming consoles and TV connected by ethernet to it.
Both routers are in a WIFI mesh that up until recently used wireless as the backhaul.
Over the weekend I added a couple of MoCa adapter so both areas are now hardwired together through the coax cable on the wall.
Why I want to upgrade
No VLAN support.
Very limited options to create new SSIDs.
… that’s pretty much it. Plus having ‘better quality’ toys to play with and better upgrade paths in the future.
What I think I need to buy
At least 1 AP. Was thinking that since things are hardwired now I can try to put one on the living room (a more central location) and see if coverage is good enough everywhere.
At least 2 switches. 6 or 8 ports each should be enough. Some PoE would be great… 2.5G isn’t that necessary. The only 2 devices I have with that are my Proxmox instance and desktop and they’re linked together.
Limitations / Other details
Don’t have a rack. Everything will go either on the living room or in my office.
Will likely not ceiling mount the AP (renting and shit).
I’m in Germany if that narrows down the advice haha.
Not really have a set budget TBH. I’ve seen the Unifi 6 Pro at ~220 Euro and that’s acceptable, can stretch if needed. For the switches… dunno, around that?.
Would like to stay inside the same ecosystem for everything if at all possible. My first option was Ubiquiti but I’m having a LOT of problem finding other than the APs in stock anywhere. This is absolutely a “Nice to have” and can be ignored if mix-n-matching is better.
Anyway that’s about it… thanks for reading my wall of text :D.
Single AP will work, but if you have two now, and pretty solid walls, maybe you should go for two. I use a pair of u6-lr myself, which also helps with my devices not going offline during scheduled firmware upgrades, and it helps with DFS radar detection wait time periods.
It kinda depends on how much money you want to pour into this project but if you’re able to tinker a bit on your own there are quite decent options without being that costly.
APs:
I guess Ubnt is the best “value” solution if you want something vendor supported otherwise getting a tri-(radio) band 11ac unit that uses ath10k or mt76-radios works very well in WDS mode (if needed) running OpenWrt.
Interesting, never heard of EnGenius before but they look like a pretty good option.
Sucks that their US page lets you order directly but the EU page has a “Contact for sales” on every item >.>. I’ll see if I can source them from somewhere else to get an idea on prices.
Oh, that Zyxel switch looks pretty good and a decent price for what I want. Could get 2 of those to cover the office and the stuff in the living room with ports to spare in both.
Do you know if the PoE on them would be enough to power an Unifi 6 Pro? From checking the datasheet it needs ~15 watts max and the switch can provide 30 watts per port but no clue on the standards if they’re compatible or whatever.
Here come the noob questions. If I go with 2 Zyxel switches + a Unifi AP (connected to one of the switches). I will be able to use OPNsense as the DHCP/gateway and also assign a different vlan to each one of the (combined) 16 lan ports + to each different SSID on the AP, right?.
If you pass the approperiate VLAN tags to each port yes, that should work fine however I have no idea what the AP supports in that regard. Also worth mentioning is that many “home” devices relies on broadcast packets for discovery which may need further network configuration if you split up your home network into different VLANs.
Yeah, I know there’s an Unifi controller or something similar because I’ve seen it mentioned a lot on lists of “things people self host”. Researching that now but as long as it’s runnable locally I should be able to self host it on my home lab.
Also yes, I’m fully aware I will absolutely wreck my some of my home automation infra that relies on broadcast and auto discovery haha. Hopefully I will also, eventually, get it running again.
Yes,
I have just deployed one powering 2 old lr-pro and 3 new uap-iw-hd, connected to a main switch through a 300mt fiber link, supporting multiple vlans
The Zyxel gui needs some getting used to, especially when working with vlans but nothing insurmountable
It has one of the most straightforward setups I have seen ever for multiple vlans, multiple ssids and multiple aps. The controller can be run form a VM, a docker container or directly from any device, windows Mac or Linux …
I looked into the TP-Link stuff and their Omada SDN management software. Looks like an alternative to the Ubiquiti Unifi stuff that can also be run locally.
Gonna watch reviews and do some more research but after a quick googling on amazon and local stores I can buy these 3 items:
Access point → EAP670
8 port switch with PoE+ + 2SFP → TL-SG2210P
8 port switch with 4 PoE+ → TL-SG2008P
(Can’t add links, sorry)
Total is about 400 Euros. Give or take, close to the lowish side of what I was expecting to spend.
There theoretically be some bottleneck as the AP has a 2.5G NIC while both switches are all 1G but seriously doubt I’ll notice that on wifi. Was looking at some of the 2.5G gear to see if it was worth to just spend extra and got with that since I’m upgrading but I think the cost is just way too steep.
I wouldn’t touch managed TP-Link switches with a stick (vendor support isn’t exactly great) but oh well, the GS1900 series are decent even if the GS1920 and higher models are nicer but overkill for this application.