I’m not really sure how to ask this question, but I want to see if this is possible.
During the quarantine, I’ve been looking a lot into building a camper/rv out of a sprinter van. Sounds cool, but I’m a computer guy and I want to bring my servers with me. I’ve already seen some low power ssd NASs and the like, but the one thing that I can’t figure out is the networking.
So I have a FreeNas server in my house along with a Unifi gateway, switch, AP, and controller. What I want out of the van is some way to wirelessly connect to house when I am parked at home and want to preload some files for my trips, then use something like a Verizon Jetpack for LTE on the road.
I’ve seen where Unifi devices can have a wireless uplink, but what I think I want is a wireless uplink with a failover to a second WAN device (LTE modem/hotspot). I basically want the van to be wireless part of the LAN while at home, but have LTE on the road.
Is any of this possible through Unifi or something like pfSense? I’m really confused on what even I’m looking for here…
(Also, I should note, I don’t have any van or Jetpack yet, all of this is future, just for fun planning. Just want to see if this is possible)
I forget what it was called might have been called wireless bridge
I was downstairs and the internet router was upstairs, couldn’t run a cable, so I made a bridge with a second router (wdrt) and had that wired into my pc
You’re about crawl into a rabit hole of external 802.11 antennae and wireless custom firmware. Be sure to name the ssid of the system FBI Surveilance Van, always a classic.
The terminology you seek is a wireless bridge. The cheapest way would involve a router in the RV that supports wireless bridge/client mode. This way the home lan and RV (wired or wifi) devices are on the same local subnet as the house.
Say home router is 192.168.0.1
RV router is 192.168.0.2
RV Router wireless bridge to Home Router as WPA client.
RV router has dhcp service configured with 192.168.0.2 as gateway.
RV router dhcp service is disabled when at home. Important so home devices don’t route to expensive lte internet.
Use a usb data cable to connect the mifi to the RV router.
Before leaving home, open RV router settings, enable dhcp, switch wifi from bridge to AP mode. When you get back reverse order.
Reccommendations for hardware usually get flagged as advertising, so basically any decent multi radio router that can run dd-wrt. Match wifi capabilities of your home router ie N/AC etc.
Gotchas. Clients don’t drop ip settings (Gateway) unless told to. You have a problem of different conditional gateways. Make matching static dhcp reservations for devices in RV and home on both routers so you don’t drive yourself nuts figuring out dhcp ips. I wouldn’t do static ips due to default gateway being set by active dhcp device depending on being home or not. You can do short lease of say an hour to keep your dhcp gateway fresh but that can cause momentary network interuptions depending on the client really.
A pi could intelligently automate this, do this but it would take days to transfer a couple of movies. You could even program a wachdog script to monitor for the presence of the home wifi network. This determines it’s own dhcp service running or not.
I’d run a dedicated AP from the wired side of your home network just for home AP for the RV bridge. You don’t want a far off wifi bridge halving the bandwidth or more of your home wifi devices.
Just setup up wifi channels preferably away from main house ones, and connect to lan to lan from main home AP. Again disable dhcp service.
Unifi won’t work because nothing can use a wireless interface as a gateway and data on their LTE thing is extremely expensive.
Pfsense will do it for you. Use the wireless interface as your default gateway and the lte device as the failover. For the LTE solution, I’d get something the plugs in via Ethernet and not usb so that you don’t have to worry about drivers.
That actually sounds like the way to go. I didn’t realize Wireless WAN, 4G WAN, and WAN Failover were so easy on pfSense. I could also just have pfSense running on one box with all the drives in ZFS and have the various media center services (plex, emby, jellyfin) running as jails. Thank you!