Ironically, it's the innocent-looking white boxes that are hellspawn devices of pure evil that will wiretap your house, force you into a subscription service and have a 2-year planned obsolescence timebomb in it.
Meanwhile anything that resembles an arachnid will let you do whatever you want, support every imaginable open standard, and work with community firmware that will still be supported a decade later.
If they also crawled around my living room floor I would probably buy two and make them fight each other over AP privileges. May the strongest signal win.
I don't think that is true for Wi-Fi 6 routers. Are there any open firmwares for those? Those bastards at TP-Link removed features after a firmware update and I no longer have any visibility to anything that is going on my network. It will be relegated to access point soon, if I don't chuck it at a wall in spite, after I figure this opnsense thing out.
Mikrotik have innocent enough boxes, although some are black but no subscription service, although it's proconsumer so it's not a easy device unless you know what are you doing or you watch a video for each thing you want to do 😅.
Try to get a carrier-grade router with 20 SFP+ cages from Asus, Mikrotik's higher end plays in the same league as Cisco or Huawei.
Mikrotik's lower-end hardware isn't really much more expensive than what you get from Asus but runs the same carrier-grade software and will never, ever, let you down when it comes to things such as packet throughput. The reason you don't see OpenWRT images often for their devices isn't because they're locked down but because people prefer their software.
Generally speaking I've found them to be far cheaper than similarly specced hardware, for the sfp+ and multigig hardware. (I've also seen benchmarks that show they can't handle the same kind of total throughput though either)
For price-value I only knew of Ubiquity, which also offers these kinds of products at supposedly more reasonable prices than the majority of the market.
Mikrotik seems to be older than Ubiquity but hasn't shown up on my radar for good value professional/prosumer equipment whereas Ubiquity has gotten a lot of hype a few years ago. I wonder what the difference is between the two
I remember Ubquity making a huge impression on the scene being touted as "professional hardware for a better price". I have never really heard that hype around Mikrotik. I'll keep them in mind though
I'm not European either. I was just looking for cheap fast hardware. I have a ubiquiti access point, it beats the pants off anything else I've used before. That said, I will never buy ubiquiti management equipment because they keep having either security issues or outages that affect your ability to administrate the network in the same room.
Great if you happen to be or know an electrician, drywall repair expert, and painter. For most of us this isn't very practical though.
I do wish that ceiling router ports were standard on new builds at least and if you didn't want to use them you could plug in smoke alarms instead.
There's nothing stopping you from just plopping these on a table somewhere.
The UFO has a pop-out notch on the rim so it can sit flat on a table or wall with a cable running out the side, and the can comes with multiple bottom attachments you can swap out depending on if you want it to rest on a table, be screwed into the side of something, or be mounted on top of a threaded bolt.
I just chose the images that showed the shapes off. It's not the only way they can be used.
In my apartment my UFO is actually mounted to the little door of the in-wall network box, when the door is closed it points into the main portion of the apartment. Perfectly usable, and for pure speed the desktop is hardwired.
Depending on how your home is constructed, installing ceiling mounted access points can be a lot easier than you might think.
Most of these APs are powered by Power over Ethernet, so they only require one cable for both power and data.
My current home is a bungalow, and installing multiple access points only required running some network cable round the loft and drilling a small hole in the ceiling for each AP - which mounts over the hole so it can’t be seen.
Consumer grade has taken a nosedive but it's head and shoulders over what the ISPs give out now.
I had to install a new gateway for my mom the other day, the one supplied by Spectrum. I haven't looked at or touched one of these things in years, I had no idea what they were like now.
I opened the box, set it up, plugged it in, saw that the only information the display gives customers now are the words "Power" and "Online", unplugged it, put it back in the box, and told Mom "I love you too much to let this in your home. I'll buy you a modem."
I didn't even get to the part where apparently you have to use an app to change the password, and the admin panel is not truly accessible anymore.
I found out that ISP provided crap can do one thing OK. I have an ISP provided cable modem / router / wifi doing only the cable modem part and bridging the connection to a MikroTik router. Then I have another ISP provided router / wifi only doing the wifi part, again bridged to the MikroTik.
Both the ISP provided boxes were crashing pretty consistently when they were doing routing, firewall, wifi etc. (torrenting with a VPN while watching a 4K stream over wifi would just melt the box) but when they're only doing one thing they've been working fine.
The only eyesore in ly setup is my ISPs router, which is only used as a fiber modem at this point. I tried to probe my ISPs customer service for any info regarding the protocol in use, but I got nowhere with them. One of these days I might fire up wireshark to see how it's connecting so I can replace it with my own, but that'd involve downtime.
My small ISP (in Germany) gives out AVM Fritzbox, and they may not be as good as ubiquity, but they are certainly not crap. The routers of the bigger ISPs have even gotten pretty good as well over here and no one is ever forced to use the ISP supplied box in Germany anyway.
I just use the Fritzbox as a router and disabled the WiFi, which I do with Ubiquity APs. In one or two years I may have had to restart it once or twice, that is good enough for me.
Yeah, they're not the best compared to something like an Aruba, but they tend to have a lot of enterprise features that are mostly functional. You just have to play the firmware lottery sometimes with the APs especially. The switches are a bit less finicky. I would never touch their firewalls.
I've maintained my own LANs for decades and don't think I've ever seen or heard of a router driver. They just have little web servers on them that you log into for your settings.
Oh, ok, gotcha. Here's my instructions for doing it on a Ubiquiti Dream Machine. Not bad at all!
Edit: Ohhhhh, you're talking about not doing WRT54G on a D-Link again, not not getting some enterprise-grade stuff. I think I'm on the same page now, sorry!
I bought a Cisco enterprise router and switch (2nd hand) - the level of available configuration is great but the noise of the fans started to do my head in. I need to figure out how to get them wired up somewhere I can't hear them all the time.
There is more than 1 way to get that level on config without having a loud energy hungry rack mounted hw... Pfsense or openwrt are just 2 of them. Drop them on a good arm device or power efficient x86 minipc and u get the best of both worlds. You lose on the seamless updates, but unless you are some high profile or paranoic person, no APT will target that 0 day in your network....
I've got a rack and PoE ceiling- and wall-mounted access points, but my router is still a TP-Link Archer C7 running OpenWRT.
Got a recommendation? I'd like to have a (cheap-ish) rackmount router running something open-source like OpenWRT or OPNsense, but even "small office"-class stuff that comes in regular metal rectangular chassis is much less than 19" wide and doesn't come with ears for rack-mounting.
Fortigate does have licensing, but that's only for support, which affects firmware downloads. The company account that I use for those has the last hardware license expiring this april. The hardware will continue to work, but I will have no way of updating it if a security hole were to be discovered.
As far as running license costs go, I have to admit that I kind of like Meraki, even though I am ideologically opposed to hardware subscriptions. It make management of loads of hardware much easier, and when a VPN goes down I can stull teoubleshoot it remotely.
Also, I will concede that the router I use is severe overkill. I could've gotten away with much less, but I'd rather rwcycle leftovers from work than see it end up on a trash heap. Ask me how I have so many rack mounted servers.
Ubiquiti's Unifi and TP-Link's Omada are certainly trying to edge in on Meraki from the Prosumer level (and not having to pay license fees to unlock hardware you already have is a plus). They both have local control hardware / software too if you don't trust them with your data.
Fortinet was on my shortlist, along with OPNsense's prebuilt hardware. Ended up just sticking with Mikrotik and getting 10Gb going for less than half the price though. Might be overkill but sure makes my media server and backups faster. Now if only Windows could actually saturate the link and not struggle to get 5Gb
I was considering this but I didn't feel it was worth my time and money. I just bought an asus soho router for $60 and waiting for it to come. Planning on outting openwrt on it and it should perform just fine. I don't need to cover a huge area at home so I don't see any issues with it.
Doing a proper network would cost me like $100 for the router and another $100 something for the wap. Not including my time wiring and setting everything up.
I’d imagine it depends on your needs. For the vast majority of people who just need to stream video or play games, a regular ass consumer router is more then enough.
This one does have beam forming antennas. I don’t know if that feature helped, but this router works in my long narrow apartment in a congested area where other routers failed.
That could be the one I was thinking of when I posted. I tried to find an image before posting because I was sure I’d seen a similar looking ship in Star Wars, but my image search skills are lacking.
That rounded white box is a POS At&T locked down fiber modem/router which they patch biweekly at 3am without your control because they don't want people hacking their devices to change the DNS server or anything useful.
It wouldn't be a problem if AT&T let you use your own fiber ONT but they don't which is technically illegal but no one has sued them yet because they are a billion dollar company.
Thankfully the workaround is to grab a supported ONT, upgrade to 2.5g or higher fiber speeds so they are forced to use XGS-PON, then swap in your ONT with some cloned IDs and downgrade back to whatever plan you want. This all allegedly works because businesses that use AT&T as their ISP also don't want to pay money for a proprietary piece of junk, and they have enough power to throw around to demand AT&T allow them to use their own fiber hardware.
There are total bypass options now to completely remove their hardware from your network using an ONT that lets you clone the att device serial number. Just a heads up.
Thanks, I like it. $200 is a bit steep for the SFP+ unit, but if I don't have to deal with the ISPs modem nonsense, it's probably worth it. I'll probably check out the discord later.
Depends on your firmware. You can install FreshTomato firmware on these things and enjoy a much better experience with many more features and higher stability.
You are talking about the same Asus that uses proprietary Trend Micro spyware on all its routers? At least it can be disabled, but by default it is enabled and spies on you
Yes. I thus recommend to flash Asuswrt-merlin. It is based on the stock Asus firmware, plus some features and minus some inconveniences as the one you mention.
I assume if it can be flashed it can take OpenWRT too? I like the aesthetic, but IDK I think I'd rather not support them at all if they put spying software on their stock installs.
Like early wifi routers weren't also stupid looking? I don't think I have ever had one that fit properly anywhere because of their odd shapes and/or antennae, and I've had wifi since 98 or 99.
As an aside: While I was working for a WISP, I came into possession of some older Ubiquity antennas and I used a couple to blast my home network's wifi across my small town so I could use wifi on my phone pretty much anywhere within 3 miles of my house. Shit was rad as fuck.
Can I get the one on the right with four antenna and a black pyramid in the middle?
“Ancient Spirits of Ethernet, transform this weak signal… to Wi-Fi, the Ever-Streaming!”
Long answer: Mimo designs benefit from different array configurations with known and well placed antenna spacing. So once you hit "good enough" there isn't much of a benefit... But the loosy Goosy any direction antennas above the Xtreme routers... No, not at all
Best guess: each antenna is optimized for a different carrier frequency and splitting traffic between antennae allows the designer to use multiple, lower-cost parts on each data stream rather than a single, higher-cost part that can handle one antenna dealing with all the traffic.
Multiple antennae carrying the same frequency can make a difference, but consumer electronics where the end user has control over the angle of the Antennas likely isn't precise enough to make use of the potential benefits.
If the antennae were very precisely positioned and had very precise phase offset, the full array could be used to have very tight control over polarization...which really doesn't matter in a home wifi environment.
Depends if they can be mapped to different channels/frequencies, then it’s possible you get more throughput assuming there isn’t some bottleneck elsewhere. afaik more antennae for the same connection, at essentially the same location, doesn’t make a difference
I have both. The white soft one is Comcast's shit forced into bridge mode, and the satanic altar is mine. Had to take their modem/gateway to get unlimited data from them.
Oh man, if you've avoided BLOOD for the fantasy elements you're really missing out on one of the best FPS games on the Build engine. Arguably the best of all time.
You point them in different directions because the speed is affected in which orientation your receiving antenna is. And with a phone it can be in just about every direction.
Every direction works, but it is just to get the most optimal bandwidth.
In the consumer-grade WiFi router all these antennas are omni-directional.
Unless you see something like this sticking out from your router, there will be no difference if you fold your antennas in a different way.
The only reason these antennas are sticking up from the router body is to lift them above the table surface, so your router will keep working even if you put it onto a metal table.
There needs to be way more antennas than six for an effective phase array, and they need to be set at fixed positions, not foldable.
So anyway, most of these antennas are only for better looks. The featureless white plastic box with internal antennas will work just the same, because plastic is transparent to WiFi signal. A spiked black altar of the wireless gods still looks more exciting.
A sect of MUDders worships Shub-Internet, sacrificing objects and praying for good connections. To no avail — its purpose is malign and evil, and it is the cause of all network slowdown.
“Freela casts a tac nuke at Shub-Internet for slowing her down.”
“Shub-Internet gulps down the tac nuke and burps happily.”
Mines a small box with two ethernet cables that connect to the switch. Its amazing. It has no wifi built in and as a result I don't have to worry if my stove ore refrigerator is between it and my bedroom.
Unfortunately not, no. The sacrificial altar is actually largely form-follows-function. It just gives the antennas a bit of distance from each other and from the metal in the router, to reduce any interference or blockage.
And the more open design allows air to circulate better, which I don't know, if this is a hard fact, but I feel like many cheap routers are as unreliable, because their hardware becomes faulty at higher temperatures.
Ultimately, though, it's also kind of accidental. You could build a relatively decent router in such a white box design, and for example in many companies, you'll see wall- or ceiling-mounted white box routers which actually contain good/reliable hardware.
But most of these white boxes, especially when they're not intended for mounting, are just cheap garbage handed out by ISPs. The sacrificial altar is something you buy intentionally, so it's generally at least not cheap garbage.
My firewall doesn't have wireless, I have a separate system of access points to provide wifi coverage across my house. Little White/beige squares dotted throughout to propagate the wireless in a coordinated effort to allow clients to connect, backhauled through a PoE switch to the firewall.
Any box my ISP gives me gets put into bridged mode and stuffed in a closet with the rest of my hardware. I never see it.
I don't like having network equipment out in the open, on shelves or whatever. All my aps are ceiling mounted and well out of the way, so they pose no more inconvenience than a smoke detector.
I have long since abandoned the consumer router industry. Most of it is borderline ewaste as far as I'm concerned. I don't trust my ISP to provide a good combination modem/router to use so all of their stuff is restricted to bridged mode, so it acts as a modem only. I won't fault anyone for not doing what I am, it's usually not cheap, but bluntly, I haven't had any significant problems with any of it since switching to this type of network, and I can upgrade any part at any time without throwing the whole thing away like you would have to for a consumer all-in-one wifi router. This path isn't for the feint of heart. It's much more difficult to manage when you need to, but when you get everything configured correctly, you basically can forget that it exists. The only down time I've had has been either power or ISP related. Obviously if the power is out, wifi doesn't work. If the ISP is having trouble getting your connection out to the internet, then all the equipment on my end isn't going to provide internet access, even if it's working flawlessly.
I've taken great pains to ensure that I don't need to look at, modify, or even think about my network or wifi very often or at all. It just works. It blends into the scenery and I don't even see it most of the time.
The list of consumer products shipping with openwrt is pretty small.
Most consumers couldn't care less about what their router is running for software, so most won't even bother trying to find one or even get one that's compatible.
It really is a shame.
For me though, I usually find that most of the hardware is lackluster at best. So I tend to use cast-off gear from enterprises. It's older, but usually a lot faster, more capable and more reliable than anything you can buy from a shelf at your local retailer, and generally not much more expensive. It serves me well, and lasts a lot longer than anything I've bought at a computer store.
I'm using a business firewall from sonicwall, a Cisco catalyst 4948 switch as my core, and a Cisco catalyst 3750-X with PoE for my access switch. I have Cisco aeronet wireless, a WLC 2504 as the controller, and a set of AIR2802i access points, IIRC. I don't think I've spent $2000 Canadian dollars for everything, and I don't expect to have to replace anything for probably 10 years, unless I want something faster than 1Gbps for my computers. The main interlink between the core and my access switch is 10Gbps and I'm all set to aggregate that to 20Gbps. I don't need the bandwidth right now, but I run a home lab which I wanted to have very fast access to. I haven't yet, but the lab will be plugged directly into the 4948, effectively eliminating any bottleneck between it and my workstation, regardless of what other traffic is on the network, since they're both using 1Gbps and I have faster connections between those systems at all points. Unless you hold out have the equivalent knowledge of a CCNA, or your seeking that knowledge, then something like what I have isn't for you (and that's most people), but it works well for me and I have the knowledge required to make it all work.
I still have a lot to do before I can put away my network engineering hat and call it good for the network, like running a lot of ethernet around my home, relocating a few access points to finish the WiFi, and repatch all my homelab systems into the 4948; among other things. If someone wants something like what I have but doesn't want to earn a degree in network administration, I usually push them towards ubiquiti. It's much simpler to administrate and offers many of the same benefits when using it. The only time that wouldn't be my recommendation is on very fast internet connections, somewhere in excess of 5Gbps, because even the UDM Pro and UDM SE can't really keep up with that velocity of traffic. They usually cap out around 6Gbps and only if the internet traffic is the only thing you're doing. Going faster for a home network gets rather difficult with the current state of technology. It's absolutely possible with a custom built opnsense or pfsense gateway, but then you need to deal with routing and switching that capacity and the situation gets difficult pretty quickly. Nearly nobody is even connected to an ISP who is offering that kind of speed right now, and even if they are, people generally won't buy the top tier speed, so the people who find themselves in this situation are generally few and far between.
The thing I like about ubiquiti is that it scales down too. You can buy a UDR and get almost all the same benefits, then scale up as needed, adding a switch and access points when the built in equipment isn't sufficient anymore. Replacing it with a USG or UDM if internet speed exceeds 1Gbps, or moving to a pfsense/opnsense router and adding a cloud key for the wireless/switching management for medium builds is also very good.
Ubiquiti is more expensive than what I do, but it is much easier for non-network specialist people to use.
To spend thousands on networking equipment you have higher needs then most home users, so it makes sense to use that enterprise gear. For most home users, it doesn't
The UDR I would recommend for most homes, is a far better choice for the average user. Basically if you need less than 1Gbps, that's the way to go. If you need more, look at either pfsense/opnsense hybrid with ubiquiti for switching and access points, or move up to the UDM pro if that's what you want. Over 5Gbps internet, you basically need to do hybrid with several vendors, and going 10G+ for internet speeds, talk to a professional.
I am a professional, so I have crazy stuff compared to what I need. My internet is only 300mbps or so. As you can imagine, I can change nothing and go 1G+. I have some QoS rules and stuff I'd need to update, but all the equipment can handle much faster internet without trouble. My current issue (and frustration) is that I can't get fiber here. If I put in a neighbor's address from across the street, a local fiber provider offers 1G symmetrical service. I contacted them about this and they gave me some jabber about city permits and such. Meanwhile when I got my internet from the local cable provider, they shut down the street for 5 minutes and installed a cable from the utility post to my house, brand new for my install. I don't know why they can't do the same, and I don't understand why they would have permits to install on one side of the road and not the other.
My issues aside, the choices really depend on each home and what it's situation is. I would never pretend that people should do the same as I do.
Ironically, it's the innocent-looking white boxes that are hellspawn devices of pure evil that will wiretap your house, force you into a subscription service and have a 2-year planned obsolescence timebomb in it.
Meanwhile anything that resembles an arachnid will let you do whatever you want, support every imaginable open standard, and work with community firmware that will still be supported a decade later.
So Jehovah's witnesses vs Satanic Temple?
Jehovah's witnesses have lasted more then 2 years sadly
Sadly indeed
If they also crawled around my living room floor I would probably buy two and make them fight each other over AP privileges. May the strongest signal win.
ceiling
I don't think that is true for Wi-Fi 6 routers. Are there any open firmwares for those? Those bastards at TP-Link removed features after a firmware update and I no longer have any visibility to anything that is going on my network. It will be relegated to access point soon, if I don't chuck it at a wall in spite, after I figure this opnsense thing out.
OpenWRT supports 70 devices with 802.11ax. 7 of them are TP-Link.
I haven't tried any of these devices myself though.
Mikrotik have innocent enough boxes, although some are black but no subscription service, although it's proconsumer so it's not a easy device unless you know what are you doing or you watch a video for each thing you want to do 😅.
Microtik looks very expensive for what they offer. What are their actual advantages of something like an ASUS?
Try to get a carrier-grade router with 20 SFP+ cages from Asus, Mikrotik's higher end plays in the same league as Cisco or Huawei.
Mikrotik's lower-end hardware isn't really much more expensive than what you get from Asus but runs the same carrier-grade software and will never, ever, let you down when it comes to things such as packet throughput. The reason you don't see OpenWRT images often for their devices isn't because they're locked down but because people prefer their software.
Generally speaking I've found them to be far cheaper than similarly specced hardware, for the sfp+ and multigig hardware. (I've also seen benchmarks that show they can't handle the same kind of total throughput though either)
For price-value I only knew of Ubiquity, which also offers these kinds of products at supposedly more reasonable prices than the majority of the market.
Mikrotik seems to be older than Ubiquity but hasn't shown up on my radar for good value professional/prosumer equipment whereas Ubiquity has gotten a lot of hype a few years ago. I wonder what the difference is between the two
Maybe because you're not European? Mikrotik is Latvian, Ubiquiti from the US.
I remember Ubquity making a huge impression on the scene being touted as "professional hardware for a better price". I have never really heard that hype around Mikrotik. I'll keep them in mind though
I'm not European either. I was just looking for cheap fast hardware. I have a ubiquiti access point, it beats the pants off anything else I've used before. That said, I will never buy ubiquiti management equipment because they keep having either security issues or outages that affect your ability to administrate the network in the same room.
Hail Sata full of cables. hollow be thy port.
Thy LAN has run, it will be fun, on the couch as it is up stairs.
Give us this day, our UDP, and forgive us our packet loss, as we forgive those who drop packets meant for us.
Cable's unplugged bro
This is definitely the way
I like the UFO and Coke can designs personally.
This post brought to you by the Unifi crew
Nobody expects the University of Florence!
The AP shaped like a tallboy is a new one for me, actually
Average Ubiquiti enjoyer:
Great if you happen to be or know an electrician, drywall repair expert, and painter. For most of us this isn't very practical though. I do wish that ceiling router ports were standard on new builds at least and if you didn't want to use them you could plug in smoke alarms instead.
There's nothing stopping you from just plopping these on a table somewhere.
The UFO has a pop-out notch on the rim so it can sit flat on a table or wall with a cable running out the side, and the can comes with multiple bottom attachments you can swap out depending on if you want it to rest on a table, be screwed into the side of something, or be mounted on top of a threaded bolt.
I just chose the images that showed the shapes off. It's not the only way they can be used.
In my apartment my UFO is actually mounted to the little door of the in-wall network box, when the door is closed it points into the main portion of the apartment. Perfectly usable, and for pure speed the desktop is hardwired.
Huh? For most homes this is like, 1 tub of spackle, a sample of paint and a paper towel
or just buy cable anchors or raceway and run it outside the drywall?
Depending on how your home is constructed, installing ceiling mounted access points can be a lot easier than you might think.
Most of these APs are powered by Power over Ethernet, so they only require one cable for both power and data.
My current home is a bungalow, and installing multiple access points only required running some network cable round the loft and drilling a small hole in the ceiling for each AP - which mounts over the hole so it can’t be seen.
Yes, there are nice. Melts into the modern house.
Neither.
19" rack mount router and switch supplying PoE to a proper wall mount access point that allows for vlan tagging per ssid.
I'm so done with consumer grade crap. After my WRT54G had to be replaced, nothing quite measured up unless I went for industrial grade hardware.
Consumer grade has taken a nosedive but it's head and shoulders over what the ISPs give out now.
I had to install a new gateway for my mom the other day, the one supplied by Spectrum. I haven't looked at or touched one of these things in years, I had no idea what they were like now.
I opened the box, set it up, plugged it in, saw that the only information the display gives customers now are the words "Power" and "Online", unplugged it, put it back in the box, and told Mom "I love you too much to let this in your home. I'll buy you a modem."
I didn't even get to the part where apparently you have to use an app to change the password, and the admin panel is not truly accessible anymore.
I found out that ISP provided crap can do one thing OK. I have an ISP provided cable modem / router / wifi doing only the cable modem part and bridging the connection to a MikroTik router. Then I have another ISP provided router / wifi only doing the wifi part, again bridged to the MikroTik.
Both the ISP provided boxes were crashing pretty consistently when they were doing routing, firewall, wifi etc. (torrenting with a VPN while watching a 4K stream over wifi would just melt the box) but when they're only doing one thing they've been working fine.
The only eyesore in ly setup is my ISPs router, which is only used as a fiber modem at this point. I tried to probe my ISPs customer service for any info regarding the protocol in use, but I got nowhere with them. One of these days I might fire up wireshark to see how it's connecting so I can replace it with my own, but that'd involve downtime.
My small ISP (in Germany) gives out AVM Fritzbox, and they may not be as good as ubiquity, but they are certainly not crap. The routers of the bigger ISPs have even gotten pretty good as well over here and no one is ever forced to use the ISP supplied box in Germany anyway.
I just use the Fritzbox as a router and disabled the WiFi, which I do with Ubiquity APs. In one or two years I may have had to restart it once or twice, that is good enough for me.
Or go with Unifi. I’d label them “prosumer” gear.
I haven't used Unifi myself, but from what I'm hering, that's an apt description.
Yeah, they're not the best compared to something like an Aruba, but they tend to have a lot of enterprise features that are mostly functional. You just have to play the firmware lottery sometimes with the APs especially. The switches are a bit less finicky. I would never touch their firewalls.
I have their USG firewall and it’s been rock solid for years. Looking forward to its successor.
I've maintained my own LANs for decades and don't think I've ever seen or heard of a router driver. They just have little web servers on them that you log into for your settings.
Oh, ok, gotcha. Here's my instructions for doing it on a Ubiquiti Dream Machine. Not bad at all!
Edit: Ohhhhh, you're talking about not doing WRT54G on a D-Link again, not not getting some enterprise-grade stuff. I think I'm on the same page now, sorry!
I bought a Cisco enterprise router and switch (2nd hand) - the level of available configuration is great but the noise of the fans started to do my head in. I need to figure out how to get them wired up somewhere I can't hear them all the time.
There is more than 1 way to get that level on config without having a loud energy hungry rack mounted hw... Pfsense or openwrt are just 2 of them. Drop them on a good arm device or power efficient x86 minipc and u get the best of both worlds. You lose on the seamless updates, but unless you are some high profile or paranoic person, no APT will target that 0 day in your network....
When I bought my house a couple of years ago I decided early on that I want a rack tucked away somewhere. Noise was part of the reason.
I fucking hate it. Replaced my shitty Isp router with a proper Opnsense box and I love it
This is what I'm working towards 🥺
I've got a rack and PoE ceiling- and wall-mounted access points, but my router is still a TP-Link Archer C7 running OpenWRT.
Got a recommendation? I'd like to have a (cheap-ish) rackmount router running something open-source like OpenWRT or OPNsense, but even "small office"-class stuff that comes in regular metal rectangular chassis is much less than 19" wide and doesn't come with ears for rack-mounting.
I'm picky with many things, but routers isn't one of them. I tend to scavenge leftovers at work. Right now I have a Fortigate 101E
I too would not be picky with a free $4,000 router, especially one that doesn't lock fucking everything down without licensing (thanks Cisco).
Fortigate does have licensing, but that's only for support, which affects firmware downloads. The company account that I use for those has the last hardware license expiring this april. The hardware will continue to work, but I will have no way of updating it if a security hole were to be discovered.
As far as running license costs go, I have to admit that I kind of like Meraki, even though I am ideologically opposed to hardware subscriptions. It make management of loads of hardware much easier, and when a VPN goes down I can stull teoubleshoot it remotely.
Also, I will concede that the router I use is severe overkill. I could've gotten away with much less, but I'd rather rwcycle leftovers from work than see it end up on a trash heap. Ask me how I have so many rack mounted servers.
Ubiquiti's Unifi and TP-Link's Omada are certainly trying to edge in on Meraki from the Prosumer level (and not having to pay license fees to unlock hardware you already have is a plus). They both have local control hardware / software too if you don't trust them with your data.
Fortinet was on my shortlist, along with OPNsense's prebuilt hardware. Ended up just sticking with Mikrotik and getting 10Gb going for less than half the price though. Might be overkill but sure makes my media server and backups faster. Now if only Windows could actually saturate the link and not struggle to get 5Gb
I was considering this but I didn't feel it was worth my time and money. I just bought an asus soho router for $60 and waiting for it to come. Planning on outting openwrt on it and it should perform just fine. I don't need to cover a huge area at home so I don't see any issues with it.
Doing a proper network would cost me like $100 for the router and another $100 something for the wap. Not including my time wiring and setting everything up.
I’d imagine it depends on your needs. For the vast majority of people who just need to stream video or play games, a regular ass consumer router is more then enough.
I'll take the ceiling mounted UFO instead.
That's technically "rounded soft box" It's completely round.
Or you could choose one with wings.
This one does have beam forming antennas. I don’t know if that feature helped, but this router works in my long narrow apartment in a congested area where other routers failed.
Isn't that the Star Wars Imperial shuttle after it's landed?
That could be the one I was thinking of when I posted. I tried to find an image before posting because I was sure I’d seen a similar looking ship in Star Wars, but my image search skills are lacking.
Of course, it isn't like you would want to risk a force choking when Vader can't get a wifi signal.
He can't choke you through thick walls
Yeah he can. He can choke through space and ships as seen in episode 5 when they drop out of hyperspace too soon
looks like a manta ray
Yeah thanks for saying that, now I just see big man from Splatoon 3
It's beautiful. Perfect device for an installation next to an aquarium.
Careful it doesn't Wi-fly away when you leave a window open
The hawk wifi's naturally beat the spider wifi's signal noise making it superior.
That rounded white box is a POS At&T locked down fiber modem/router which they patch biweekly at 3am without your control because they don't want people hacking their devices to change the DNS server or anything useful.
It wouldn't be a problem if AT&T let you use your own fiber ONT but they don't which is technically illegal but no one has sued them yet because they are a billion dollar company.
Thankfully the workaround is to grab a supported ONT, upgrade to 2.5g or higher fiber speeds so they are forced to use XGS-PON, then swap in your ONT with some cloned IDs and downgrade back to whatever plan you want. This all allegedly works because businesses that use AT&T as their ISP also don't want to pay money for a proprietary piece of junk, and they have enough power to throw around to demand AT&T allow them to use their own fiber hardware.
I love having Google Fiber, they gave me a modem with one open RJ-45 port and said "have fun with the other side of this network".
Google fiber still exists? Huh, I figured that would be another good project they kill off after a year or two
It's only in certain areas, I live in Seattle and it's in Seattle but not everywhere in Seattle.
There are total bypass options now to completely remove their hardware from your network using an ONT that lets you clone the att device serial number. Just a heads up.
Mind to direct me to the right direction on this? For academic purposes, of course.
https://discord.gg/8311-886329492438671420
Basically has all the documentation and links you need in one section because its made up of various forum posts and google docs lol.
I picture you whispering this at the full moon while sharpening a blade.
Oh hi. What XGS-PON device allows a cloned ID?
I've actually been looking for one forever.
Check here: https://discord.gg/8311-886329492438671420
The two most common are:
There are notes and some people who have found others that work as well
Thanks, I like it. $200 is a bit steep for the SFP+ unit, but if I don't have to deal with the ISPs modem nonsense, it's probably worth it. I'll probably check out the discord later.
Depends on your firmware. You can install FreshTomato firmware on these things and enjoy a much better experience with many more features and higher stability.
The one on the right is ASUS, they make pretty good quality hardware and software and don't spy on you, at least for what concerns routers.
You are talking about the same Asus that uses proprietary Trend Micro spyware on all its routers? At least it can be disabled, but by default it is enabled and spies on you
Yes. I thus recommend to flash Asuswrt-merlin. It is based on the stock Asus firmware, plus some features and minus some inconveniences as the one you mention.
I assume if it can be flashed it can take OpenWRT too? I like the aesthetic, but IDK I think I'd rather not support them at all if they put spying software on their stock installs.
I have a ASUS RTAX53U running OpenWrt 23.05.
Here you can find a list of devices supported by the current version.
Why dont you give me your Routers source code if you have nothing to hide, Asus?
They are obligated to publish the routers' firmware source code under GPL-2 since it's primarily based on Tomato and OpenWRT firmware.
You can find the respective source code on the Support page of every router, tab Driver & Utility > Driver & Tools > OS: Others.
If the version you find there does not match the last published firmware, you can send them an e-mail.
Like early wifi routers weren't also stupid looking? I don't think I have ever had one that fit properly anywhere because of their odd shapes and/or antennae, and I've had wifi since 98 or 99.
As an aside: While I was working for a WISP, I came into possession of some older Ubiquity antennas and I used a couple to blast my home network's wifi across my small town so I could use wifi on my phone pretty much anywhere within 3 miles of my house. Shit was rad as fuck.
You're right. That is rad as fuck.
Can I get the one on the right with four antenna and a black pyramid in the middle? “Ancient Spirits of Ethernet, transform this weak signal… to Wi-Fi, the Ever-Streaming!”
Your description makes me want to have a Stargate shaped one, where the status lights are the dialing symbols around the ring.
Fuck, chevron 4 locked again
Shall the Sphinx of Black Quartz Judge My Vow?
'member when this show was new, and our current technology was still in the realm of sci-fi?
That is as long ago right now as World War II was when that show first aired. 😳
Science!
The Elders of the Internet demand.... a shrubbery!
I'll take one satanic altar please
If only they came in chromed hexahedrons.. I would get one and obey it.
Same.
I've got the corporate ubiquiti flying saucer in my house. It kind of irritates me, but it works.
Serious question: Do the antennas actually make a difference?
Short answer no.
Long answer: Mimo designs benefit from different array configurations with known and well placed antenna spacing. So once you hit "good enough" there isn't much of a benefit... But the loosy Goosy any direction antennas above the Xtreme routers... No, not at all
Thank you
Best guess: each antenna is optimized for a different carrier frequency and splitting traffic between antennae allows the designer to use multiple, lower-cost parts on each data stream rather than a single, higher-cost part that can handle one antenna dealing with all the traffic.
Multiple antennae carrying the same frequency can make a difference, but consumer electronics where the end user has control over the angle of the Antennas likely isn't precise enough to make use of the potential benefits.
If the antennae were very precisely positioned and had very precise phase offset, the full array could be used to have very tight control over polarization...which really doesn't matter in a home wifi environment.
OR! It's just for looks.
Thank you. I love it when I learn shit in meme threads.
Depends if they can be mapped to different channels/frequencies, then it’s possible you get more throughput assuming there isn’t some bottleneck elsewhere. afaik more antennae for the same connection, at essentially the same location, doesn’t make a difference
Thank you
I have the satanic modem
I have both. The white soft one is Comcast's shit forced into bridge mode, and the satanic altar is mine. Had to take their modem/gateway to get unlimited data from them.
The cybernetic gods require BLOOD, before your wifi works.
The original BLOOD or a more modern source port?
I don't do magic and vampires, and I don't mix toys, but I also haven't read the release notes so couldn't actually tell you.
Oh man, if you've avoided BLOOD for the fantasy elements you're really missing out on one of the best FPS games on the Build engine. Arguably the best of all time.
I am sorry. I decided long ago that magic, elves, dragons, vampires, magic, trolls, gnomes, and magic was anathema.
I don't swing that way. Yeah it's a shame because a lot of great games contain that kind of entartete kunst, alas, here we are.
I almost get triggered just talking about it.
I'm not the most knowledgeable about networking hardware.
At what point are those antennas just excessive?
Not mainly
You point them in different directions because the speed is affected in which orientation your receiving antenna is. And with a phone it can be in just about every direction.
Every direction works, but it is just to get the most optimal bandwidth.
In the consumer-grade WiFi router all these antennas are omni-directional.
Unless you see something like this sticking out from your router, there will be no difference if you fold your antennas in a different way.
The only reason these antennas are sticking up from the router body is to lift them above the table surface, so your router will keep working even if you put it onto a metal table.
I think they were more attempting to reference antenna phasing rather than direction. Which can help apparently, but I've never seen a difference.
There needs to be way more antennas than six for an effective phase array, and they need to be set at fixed positions, not foldable.
So anyway, most of these antennas are only for better looks. The featureless white plastic box with internal antennas will work just the same, because plastic is transparent to WiFi signal. A spiked black altar of the wireless gods still looks more exciting.
It's beam forming and this says it calibrates each time so moving the antennas doesn't matter.
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/80211ac-a-survival/9781449357702/ch04.html
My understanding is most of the antennas on the Asus routers are dummies, just there for the look. Most have 2 actual antennas, some have 4.
My cat will sit on either of them.
Ugh not good for the heat to get trapped 😩
My Soft Round Box got damaged so I took the case off and now it's a Cyborg.
Mine is white, but with 4 long antenna sticking up. So I think of it more as "deer antlers mounted on the wall."
toaster or henge
A sect of MUDders worships Shub-Internet, sacrificing objects and praying for good connections. To no avail — its purpose is malign and evil, and it is the cause of all network slowdown.
“Freela casts a tac nuke at Shub-Internet for slowing her down.”
“Shub-Internet gulps down the tac nuke and burps happily.”
-- Taken from the Jargon File
For most males this choice comes down to wether you are married or not.
Mines a small box with two ethernet cables that connect to the switch. Its amazing. It has no wifi built in and as a result I don't have to worry if my stove ore refrigerator is between it and my bedroom.
I very much prefer the white style. But the black style probably screams cool to more consumers. :)
Cool is exactly what I'm looking for in a router
My fiber modem is sort of a white diamond-shaped tower.
I mean, we both know which of these routers is better...
I'm outside the weboth, would it happen to be the one that isn't a sacrificial altar-design?
Unfortunately not, no. The sacrificial altar is actually largely form-follows-function. It just gives the antennas a bit of distance from each other and from the metal in the router, to reduce any interference or blockage.
And the more open design allows air to circulate better, which I don't know, if this is a hard fact, but I feel like many cheap routers are as unreliable, because their hardware becomes faulty at higher temperatures.
Ultimately, though, it's also kind of accidental. You could build a relatively decent router in such a white box design, and for example in many companies, you'll see wall- or ceiling-mounted white box routers which actually contain good/reliable hardware.
But most of these white boxes, especially when they're not intended for mounting, are just cheap garbage handed out by ISPs. The sacrificial altar is something you buy intentionally, so it's generally at least not cheap garbage.
I use a firewall, so none of these apply to me.
My firewall doesn't have wireless, I have a separate system of access points to provide wifi coverage across my house. Little White/beige squares dotted throughout to propagate the wireless in a coordinated effort to allow clients to connect, backhauled through a PoE switch to the firewall.
Any box my ISP gives me gets put into bridged mode and stuffed in a closet with the rest of my hardware. I never see it.
I don't like having network equipment out in the open, on shelves or whatever. All my aps are ceiling mounted and well out of the way, so they pose no more inconvenience than a smoke detector.
I have long since abandoned the consumer router industry. Most of it is borderline ewaste as far as I'm concerned. I don't trust my ISP to provide a good combination modem/router to use so all of their stuff is restricted to bridged mode, so it acts as a modem only. I won't fault anyone for not doing what I am, it's usually not cheap, but bluntly, I haven't had any significant problems with any of it since switching to this type of network, and I can upgrade any part at any time without throwing the whole thing away like you would have to for a consumer all-in-one wifi router. This path isn't for the feint of heart. It's much more difficult to manage when you need to, but when you get everything configured correctly, you basically can forget that it exists. The only down time I've had has been either power or ISP related. Obviously if the power is out, wifi doesn't work. If the ISP is having trouble getting your connection out to the internet, then all the equipment on my end isn't going to provide internet access, even if it's working flawlessly.
I've taken great pains to ensure that I don't need to look at, modify, or even think about my network or wifi very often or at all. It just works. It blends into the scenery and I don't even see it most of the time.
Consumer routers are fine if they run openwrt
The list of consumer products shipping with openwrt is pretty small.
Most consumers couldn't care less about what their router is running for software, so most won't even bother trying to find one or even get one that's compatible.
It really is a shame.
For me though, I usually find that most of the hardware is lackluster at best. So I tend to use cast-off gear from enterprises. It's older, but usually a lot faster, more capable and more reliable than anything you can buy from a shelf at your local retailer, and generally not much more expensive. It serves me well, and lasts a lot longer than anything I've bought at a computer store.
I'm using a business firewall from sonicwall, a Cisco catalyst 4948 switch as my core, and a Cisco catalyst 3750-X with PoE for my access switch. I have Cisco aeronet wireless, a WLC 2504 as the controller, and a set of AIR2802i access points, IIRC. I don't think I've spent $2000 Canadian dollars for everything, and I don't expect to have to replace anything for probably 10 years, unless I want something faster than 1Gbps for my computers. The main interlink between the core and my access switch is 10Gbps and I'm all set to aggregate that to 20Gbps. I don't need the bandwidth right now, but I run a home lab which I wanted to have very fast access to. I haven't yet, but the lab will be plugged directly into the 4948, effectively eliminating any bottleneck between it and my workstation, regardless of what other traffic is on the network, since they're both using 1Gbps and I have faster connections between those systems at all points. Unless you hold out have the equivalent knowledge of a CCNA, or your seeking that knowledge, then something like what I have isn't for you (and that's most people), but it works well for me and I have the knowledge required to make it all work.
I still have a lot to do before I can put away my network engineering hat and call it good for the network, like running a lot of ethernet around my home, relocating a few access points to finish the WiFi, and repatch all my homelab systems into the 4948; among other things. If someone wants something like what I have but doesn't want to earn a degree in network administration, I usually push them towards ubiquiti. It's much simpler to administrate and offers many of the same benefits when using it. The only time that wouldn't be my recommendation is on very fast internet connections, somewhere in excess of 5Gbps, because even the UDM Pro and UDM SE can't really keep up with that velocity of traffic. They usually cap out around 6Gbps and only if the internet traffic is the only thing you're doing. Going faster for a home network gets rather difficult with the current state of technology. It's absolutely possible with a custom built opnsense or pfsense gateway, but then you need to deal with routing and switching that capacity and the situation gets difficult pretty quickly. Nearly nobody is even connected to an ISP who is offering that kind of speed right now, and even if they are, people generally won't buy the top tier speed, so the people who find themselves in this situation are generally few and far between.
The thing I like about ubiquiti is that it scales down too. You can buy a UDR and get almost all the same benefits, then scale up as needed, adding a switch and access points when the built in equipment isn't sufficient anymore. Replacing it with a USG or UDM if internet speed exceeds 1Gbps, or moving to a pfsense/opnsense router and adding a cloud key for the wireless/switching management for medium builds is also very good.
Ubiquiti is more expensive than what I do, but it is much easier for non-network specialist people to use.
Sorry for the rant.
To spend thousands on networking equipment you have higher needs then most home users, so it makes sense to use that enterprise gear. For most home users, it doesn't
Agreed.
The UDR I would recommend for most homes, is a far better choice for the average user. Basically if you need less than 1Gbps, that's the way to go. If you need more, look at either pfsense/opnsense hybrid with ubiquiti for switching and access points, or move up to the UDM pro if that's what you want. Over 5Gbps internet, you basically need to do hybrid with several vendors, and going 10G+ for internet speeds, talk to a professional.
I am a professional, so I have crazy stuff compared to what I need. My internet is only 300mbps or so. As you can imagine, I can change nothing and go 1G+. I have some QoS rules and stuff I'd need to update, but all the equipment can handle much faster internet without trouble. My current issue (and frustration) is that I can't get fiber here. If I put in a neighbor's address from across the street, a local fiber provider offers 1G symmetrical service. I contacted them about this and they gave me some jabber about city permits and such. Meanwhile when I got my internet from the local cable provider, they shut down the street for 5 minutes and installed a cable from the utility post to my house, brand new for my install. I don't know why they can't do the same, and I don't understand why they would have permits to install on one side of the road and not the other.
My issues aside, the choices really depend on each home and what it's situation is. I would never pretend that people should do the same as I do.
This is the way