I have a very built from scraps networking setup and am refreshing it. I have 2 homes and was going to build a multi site setup. I also have a few dev machines, IOT, and media centers at each site. I would like to merge the media centers into one place.
Does anyone have recommendations or articles comparing hardware? A brief review I was thinking of using ubiquiti products.
What do you gain having the two homes networked together? Are they close enough to share the same physical internet connection, or are you looking for a WAN type solution?
Ubiquiti or Mikrotik for the switches and APs (stick with one though, I wouldn’t mix). Possibly pfsense for the router, or if you want to get fancy, Ubiquiti or Mikrotik for the router and pfsense as an additional gateway/firewall.
While not officially available on Ubiquiti or Pfsense (yet), and only available in unstable OS on Mikrotik (last I checked), you’ll want to use WireGuard to tunnel between the sites.
The two locations are not close enough to share the same physical internet connection. I have some computers I done really want accessible to the internet but I want to connect to when developing. I also want to rebuild my media center PC.
There is a way to add WireGuard to both Unifi and EdgeOS. I am actually using it in EdgeOS and no issues yet, but it takes a little extra work to maintain (have to update it separately). I would not recommend any custom config in Unifi because it will be reset very easily and if you make a mistake editing the json config file, it can cause a lot of headache.
There is also a user-space go implementation that works in FreeBSD, but obviously a kernel implementation is preferable. Not sure if you can hack that into pfsense or not.
Are they close at all? If you have line of site under 10km, you could set up a wireless point-to-point. Ubiquiti has a lot of options for that sort of thing.
I am guessing that you are wanting the two sites connected with a VPN tunnel?
If that is the case then depending on how in-depth you want to go there are quite a few different ways you can use an Edgerouter and price wise they aren’t too bad.
Gonna agree with @oO.o Ubiquiti’s point to point stuff is pretty sweet
Yeah, EdgeMax line has been my preference for many years, although given how much Ubiquiti seems to favor their Unifi line, Miktrotik might be a better option… unless of course you want Unifi. EdgeMax requires considerably more networking chops than Unifi or even pfsense. It will let you do really stupid things if you’re not careful, but is also much more flexible. I believe Mikrotik is similar.
They are in different states
WireGuard it is then… you can also use OpenVPN until WG gets official support in whichever solution you choose. What are your WAN speeds in both locations? If you’re up is less than 100mbs, WG won’t make that big of a difference in throughput.