After dealing with a mesh network and when I am away on business trips being tired of helping my wife fix things on our way old routers. And we are moving to a new house so I thought it was a good opportunity to upgrade.
I ruled out some brands automatically like Ubiquiti due to their poor security management and I want to be able to self host the network controller. I settled on the TP-Link wifi 6 EAPs, as they support poe and a plug in power adapter. Also, you can self hose a community version of their omada controller. In the new house I also, have 1.2gigabit ethernet on xfinity, the modem has a 2.5 gigabit port. So I am trying to find a wired router that ideally doesn’t have any wifi on it, as I just want to use access points tied to a seperate network switch. I am having trouble finding such a device. unfortunately TP link doesn’t have anything above 1gigabit. Does anyone have any ideas or thoughts.
Thanks, I was thinking I might have to go that way. but was hoping someone knew a good product. I guess I’d better get comfortable for the research rabbit hole that will take me down.
If you’re looking for less power/smaller form factor/lower price… but also less versatility/performance - there’s Odroid H2+ . There’s OEM plastic cases for it in various form factors and there’s an add-on card to get more ports if that’s what you need. STH did an article and a video on it.
Roughly 5 years ago I got myself a J4115 board from ASRock to use as my router on a stick router - it worked ok for my use cases up to 1Gbps symmetrical with plenty of CPU remaining - odroid H2+ should be ok with your 1.2Gbps too.
I wouldn’t bother with pfsense on it, and would stick to openwrt myself, both for performance and simplicity.
Another thing I just thought of, there’s also a Helios 64 . Which has a single 2.5Gbps port, if you want to do a “router on a stick” setup through VLANs it might be good enough for your use case.
If you want to DIY, then essentially all you need is a few lines of iptables for IPv4 masquerading nat and dnsmasq for basic DHCP and DNS forwarding. I’m not sure what you’d need for IPv6 as ISP setups for IPv6 vary (some give you a /48 if you ask for it, some require you to use an ND relay and pixie dust for obtaining addresses).
The original helios64 doesn’t actually support 2.5 gbps on that port, there is some internal hardware bug that its performance is actually 1gbps or something like that. I love the idea of the helios64 and I hope whenever they ship the next version(and it has some minor improvements) I can get one and throw it on a shelf at my dad’s house so I have a remote backup storage site.
I think I’m going to do the hp t730 thin client with a dual or quad 10g card. This gives me max flexiblity and it seams no matter what I do I have to pay to play to get these speeds.
my cable modem is giving me ip address, so I don’t need to do any of the stuff with the ISP as of right now, I just need to handle my internal routing.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I’ve learned a lot digging into this.