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Comment by fro0116 | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any recommendations for alternatives?

Separate the function of wifi and router. My home office, which is bottlenecked by the docsis3.0 last mile, is on a Ubiquiti edgerouter-x ($46) router. And then a single ubnt UAP-AC 2X2 MIMO, dual band 802.11ac AP ($79).

The OS on the ubnt edgerouter series is a fork of vyatta, which is Debian based.

Also for people who know what they are doing, a mikrotik rb3011 would be a good choice.

> Also for people who know what they are doing

The recommendation for the rb3011; or winbox and routerOS in general?

While it is not perfect. I do not know of other vendors with open docs like the mikrotik wiki[0].

With winbox, wiki, and not to bad cli. I feel it a good starting point for non network engineers. Better then horrible web interface or arcane cli interface.

Any recommendations for someone that want to learn to know what they are doing?

[0]: https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Main_Page

I've generally found the Ubiquiti hardware to be a fair bit better than Mikrotik stuff (way better forwarding speeds with the accelerated Cavium processors in the EdgeRouters - except the ER-X, which doesn't have the hardware offload but is still useful). I find their web UI far less confusing too. I know some guys who have used Mikrotiks a lot and swear by it, but unless you're already experienced with Mikrotik interfaces I'd recommend the Ubiquiti.

They also have a really good command line interface - which is lucky, because the biggest downside with the Ubiquitis is that some (generally more obscure and advanced) features can't be configured through the web UI.

Asus+Merlin firmware is what I am running now. Stable, with enough features included out of the box. Compared to the bundled horror from the TelCo I get nearly 3x wifi performance on -ac.

In the ski lodge, OpenWRT and a $20 TP-Link have uptime measured in years by now. OpenWRT is awesome.

Uptime in years mean you have no security - there has been a couple of horrible WPA2 faults fixed in the last year.

Open source to the rescue.

https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864_ac-wifi

That page is impossible.

Problem with OpenWRT is that most people run it on garbage consumer-grade hardware.

The intentions of the developers are good, but just try getting full kernel level documentation out of a company like Broadcom.

As opposed to what, more expensive Ubiquiti hardware that uses the same processors and radios?

There's a bunch of 'reference' devices that runs OpenWRT well. The list is pretty long

https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864

I personally had good experiences with TP-Link Archer C7 and GL Networks mini-routers.

I love Asus networking products.

The N generation like the RT-N12 is dirt cheap now. I deploy them in client offices and they have uptime measured in years.

It's not WiFi Ac and I don't care. It stays stable, has guest WiFi networks, and usable firmware.

Netgate router board with a mSATA drive and PFSense for the router. Ubiquiti APs for wireless. Run the Ubiquiti unifi software from a Docker image on your workstation or home server. Cisco SG-nnn series switches.

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