I graph my data in/out with grafana. When a new IP or MAC shows up on my network I get a push notification on my phone (I wrote a small script to do this). Really great to have options to do what I want. Also it runs wireguard.
I hugely support the idea (or just using Debian), but what a sad sad sad sad sad state of affairs there is with trying to do this!
There's the most limited, tiny, miniscule amount of wifi add-on cards one can buy with decent chipsets. Consumer offerings with consumer-targetting chips have never worked well for me (terrible performance with multiple clients, huge multi-second drop outs, low max client limits), and I spent years trying hard to make something work. The market feels basically reduced to one company, Compex, making PCIe & m.2 addons[1] one can maybe perhaps buy, that do a decent job, and their availability is somewhat scarce, and prices are pretty high.
Imo DIY ought be such a commonsense straightforward alternative to these fancy routers. Alas it seems almost impossible to do, short of scrounging for some expensive, demanding Compex chips, and hoping the open source drivers are up to snuff (they're not always). And Compex prices have gone up and up and up. Their modern 4x4 m.2 card is $400[2], but hey, at least it's possible to buy something: without this card, we'd have nothing. Oh, and that card doesn't have x86 drivers available for it, only drivers for Qualcomm platforms.
[1] https://compex.com.sg/wifi-module/
[2] https://www.arrow.com/en/products/pn02.7/compex-systems-pte-...
Think OpenWRT would work well on something like this: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h2plus/
It's pretty low power (TDP 10 watts or so for the CPU), pretty fast (for a router), max 32GB ram, and has an expansion board for 2.5Gbit x 4 on top of the 2.5Gbit x 2 on board.
Was hoping to hook up two desktops and a NAS with 2.5Gbit, then run GigE for cameras, Roku, etc.
I'm just using darkstat, which has the benefit of being dead simple and available via opkg. But, it's fairly limited. I already have a Grafana dashboard elsewhere on the network, so I'd be curious as to how you feed it with network stats from OpenWRT.
Hth :)
Hardkernel has a J4115 Celeron (10 watt max tdp) board with max 32GB ram (two sodimm slots), and 2 x 2.5Gbit ports. They also have a 4 x 2.5Gbit board you can add. So relatively low power, 6 x 2.5Gbit ports, plenty of ram for running any network services you want.
No idea how well OpenWRT or similar would be supported though.
As for 2.5Gbps Ethernet NICs with OpenWrt - I guess it depends on the particular component/NIC. People I know have had rather bad results with 2.5Gbps Realtek NICs on Windows, and I don't know if the Linux drivers fare any better. Unless you really need the additional bandwidth, I'm pretty certain that you will have the all-around better experience when sticking to 1Gbps hardware for now.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086MK4YB8
It also has a SIM slot so you can fallback to LTE if your main internet goes down.
I should mention. This doesn't have wifi. I buy distinct access points that are POE powered. For those, i use the WAX-610.
That being said, I don't know what Wifi chipset would be really good option right now.
The thing is that those kinds of speeds are not realistically possible.
Ubiquiti claims "2.4Gbps" on 5Ghz in the specs, but it's one of those marketing things, like how TP-Link claims to sell a "11Gbps" router, which is just them adding together all the absolute peak data rates together times how many simultaneous streams it can support. It's marketing nonsense, just like those wall wart-powered PC surround speaker systems that promise "3000 WATTS OF POWER".
No client device will ever get near those promised ultimate maximum speeds, because most client hardware is 2x2 streams (two receive, two transmit) or rarely 3x3 for high-end devices. The client is the limiting factor, it doesn't matter if the router is 4x4 or 8x8.
If you look at the matrix of possible data rates, 802.11ax can do up to 1.2Gbps per stream, and can obviously use two simultaneous streams, that's where they get the claimed 2.4Gbps figure. But you can only get that bandwidth if you use 160MHz wide channels, which severely cuts down on the number of available channels.
If you can detect any other 5Ghz networks from where you want to set up your AP, I would strongly advise against trying to use 160MHz wide channels, and even 80MHz wide channels can be troublesome in apartment buildings. For an enterprise deployment with multiple APs to cover entire floors and buildings, forget it. 40MHz wide channels are the realistic choice in that scenario. That's why Wifi 6E with the additional new 6GHz spectrum is much more interesting than 802.11ax.
But let's say you can run 160MHz wide channels with no interference, your client device can support it and you're close enough to the AP so your connection is strong enough to actually get that promised 2.4Gbps PHY speed. It's theoretically possible, at least.
Well, then you go ahead and subtract 40% for combined overhead in the wireless communication and protocols.
That puts us at 1.4Gbps throughput. For a single device under 100% optimal conditions.
I'm sure Ubiquiti crunched the numbers and figured it wasn't worth it to put 2.5Gbps ports on their APs, especially considering 99.9% of them will be end up plugged into corporate 1Gbps PoE switches. Can you even get reasonably priced 24/48-port 2.5Gbps PoE switches?
I've also done wireless deployments with APU2 and a wifi card, and the range was not great. Things also might be better with better antennas, or under Linux where drivers are likely more mature. I've never run anything but OpenBSD on them.
I currently have an EdgeRouter-X running openwrt and are relatively happy with it. I think I could eek more bandwidth out of it but honestly I'd rather not fiddle with it.
I have some Unifi AC-Pro access points and am pretty happy with those.
Combined router/access points devices are the networking equivalent of TV/VCR combo devices.
Basically set the trigger (the "if this") to an incoming webhook and set the action (the "then that") to be sending a notification.
https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notif...
It’s all software
You should think about putting it online via github or similar. Probably many others would be interested in that functionality.