Comment by mrbill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrbill | Hacker News Reader

~3 weeks ago I upgraded to an industrial-quality Cisco Aironet 1252AG access point (no -ac but it does -n 300Mbps just fine), that I got off eBay with power supply for a grand total of $60.

I'm a big fan of separating the NAT/router functionality from access-point functionality, and my core "router" is a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter (X right now, used to be the Lite).

I'm also a big fan of tweakable routers/APs (I formerly wouldn't buy something unless it could run DDWrt or OpenWRT) and have a couple storage tubs full of various wireless gear, including an Asus AC68U and the Ubiquiti Unifi-LR (running OpenWRT) that was formerly my main AP.

Despite all of this, I have an OnHub on preorder that should get here tomorrow, and I'm excited. There's tons of promise for this hardware, including home automation features that haven't been implemented yet - and despite what one review said, you can use it just as an AP - that's what "bridge mode" is.

However, I'm going to run it in parallel with the Cisco AP for a while before moving all my stuff over. Always have a fallback plan...

Sorry this is a bit off topic, but - What made you move away from the Unifi LR?

I'm actually going to be upgrading my networking equipment soon and was considering doing an edge router x and a unifi LR - I've deployed a few LR's professionally and found them very stable with far reaching quality signal.

Was there an issue you ran into with the AP, or did you just want something more that it couldnt do?

The -LR won't do 5Ghz, it's 2.4Ghz g/n-only.

Do you have access to the UniFi beta forums?

I've heard that UBNT is going to release some new UniFi APs soon-ish-ly. You might want to consider waiting to see their specs and price point before performing your upgrade.

Thanks for posting this, the Aironet looks really nice! I was considering the Unifi-LR but the Aironet looks like it accomplishes the same, with the added benefit of supporting 802.11n.

Would you please post which Aironet power supply did you got? It's not clear from the manual or eBay listings which one I would need.

This is the AP I got (there's others available for around the same price, but the deal with the two antennas was too good to pass up:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/261985177103

Here's the power injector you need to be able to run both radio modules at the same time:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/252032508098

You'll want the c1250-k9w7-tar.152-2.JA1.tar IOS load to run it on "autonomous" mode (not needing a central controller) and have Chrome/Firefox compatibility for the Web UI if you use it.

It is worth saying, that with those Aironet APs, if it doesn't expressly say it comes with the antennas and power supply, assume that it doesn't. Cisco actually sells them that way, and you're meant to mix and match which antenna configuration you need (but only certain ones are supported).

They're a good buy, but aren't designed for consumers at all (or to be deployed as small business/home APs).

They're not "normal end user" friendly at all, but once you get them up and working they're great.

I still find it amazing that I can get what is near $1K-original-price worth of industrial-grade AP for less than $100.

Is it even possible to get firmware updates for these without a Cisco support contract?

You can get IOS 12 (autonomous) for it with only a Cisco support login (no contract), but I had to ask a friend for the IOS 15 image. Got huge performance improvements with the newer version.

Vaguely off-topic: Why'd you move from the ERL to the ERX? If my ERL burst into flames today, would you suggest that I replace it with an X? Assume that I have $120 dollars to spend and I don't need (but wouldn't particularly mind) extra switch ports. Is there anything that the ERL does better than the X?

It looks like X doesn't have any hardware acceleration for forwarding. With 64b packets, X can only push 130k PPS while ERL should do at least 1M PPS. This doesn't matter in a home network though.

kornholi, do you have an ER X? If you do, I appreciate your first-hand information. If you don't, I asked mrbill the question that I asked because I was looking for his first-hand experience.

Regardless: Much love, man! :)

What kind of uplink/downlink bandwidth do you have/need?

As the other poster said, the ERX doesn't have hardware offloading (UBNT beta forums says they're working on it), but for my use case, there's no difference in performance between the two so the cheaper ($50 vs $99) ERX is fine.

ERL has the advantage of the onboard flash being a USB flash drive plugged internally and a dedicated serial console port; ERX is permanent onboard flash and no serial console unless you open it up and find the points on the board.

I'm going to dodge your question [0] and ask a different one that cuts to the heart of the matter [1]: "Unless I'm mis-reading the datasheet, it seems like the device has a worst-case switching speed of ~8.3 mbit/second. Have you played around with it to try to determine its performance when filtering or routing packets? (As opposed to just switching packets.)."

[0] Thanks much for the other info, though! That's useful stuff.

[1] Sorry for not asking this question in my original post. :(

I can easily max out doing a speedtest on my 50/10 link from a client behind the ERX to a speed test server on the WAN side, if that helps any.

Yeah, that helps! Thanks for the info.

Courious why did you replace the EdgeRouter Lite with X ? Looks like the X doesn't have hardware acceleration and is cheaper.

For my needs, they're performance-identical (I only have 50/10 Business internet from Comcast), and well, I wanted to try out the ERX just to see how it compared. So much feature! So tiny box!

So far so good, and I have three OpenVPN tunnels nailed up 24/7 to various company locations.

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