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Comment by dolni | Hacker News Reader

So the question for becomes: is there just not a good enthusiast market for this stuff? I have met a number of people who are "network nerds", so I'm inclined to think the market does exist. With any of the plethora of consumer devices (Linksys, Netgear, D-Link) it's a dice roll whether your gear is complete garbage or not. A lot of the time, you're coming up snake eyes.

I've got some Ubiquiti gear I bought a couple years ago. Like you, I want good quality gear that I can manage myself. I don't need a bunch of fancy corporate garbage, like link aggregation or cloud management. Give me solid, hardware accelerated routing and switching, flexibility over my local DNS, and maybe some VLANing.

I was running Linux on a small x86 box as my last network router. Maybe it's time to get back to that. That or go back to banging rocks together. Haven't decided which, yet.

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? So the question for becomes: is there just not a good enthusiast market for this stuff? I have met a number of people who are "network nerds", so I'm inclined to think the market does exist.

my experience as a professional "network nerd" is that most other people in the networking field run cheap/second hand enterprise gear fetched from their employer at a major discount and simply seem to care less about wifi in general.

IDK, Mikrotik works for me. The 'second-hand enterprise gear' is either too unwieldy, requires too much power, or most frequently, both.

EDIT: it's when you get into supply contracts in the thousands .. then it gets tricky

A lot of that changed with my peer group either due to caring about managing from a phone or caring about power/noise. The latter are especially not things real enterprise gear tends to optimize for.

Ubiquity captured the prosumer networking market.

The wireless is something for guests, and is hacked together with something you know works with an open router OS, or something off-the-shelf on an isolated VLAN.

That kinda thing yeah, at least myself and other engineers I’ve compared notes with.

I picked up a pair of Aruba 3200 controllers and a bucket full of APs on a local auction site for a song years back, still does me fine. Then again, not caring about the fastest latest standards is key, if you’re chasing current gen the enterprise stuff is unaffordable. You do need the appetite for a bigger power bill, mind.

I can't imagine that there isn't a market for this. Look at the number of people recommending Ubiquiti stuff to each other. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to it. If your whole living space or small office can be covered with a single access point, get a 3-in-1 combo that has a WAP, a router, and a small switch. But if you don't, you are left with, what exactly? There is also some demand for mesh stuff, for people who rent and don't want to run Ethernet cable.

My plan: OPNsense on a PC Engines board for router + firewall, an unmanaged PoE-providing switch for switching, and something from 2-8 WAPs for indoor/outdoor Wi-Fi.

There were/are some performance implication of pfSense/OPNSense on these boards specifically. It seems like this has improved significantly in FreeBSD 12+.

https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/apu2-1-gigabit-through...

> APU2, APU3 and APU4 motherboards have four 1Ghz CPU cores, pfSense by default uses only 1 core per connection. This limitation still exists, however, a single-core performance has considerably improved.

I can saturate 1GB/s with no problem OoB on Debian/OpenWRT on APU2/3/4, ymmv

I had a PC Engines board for awhile and I really liked it, but make sure the one you order can support your internet bandwidth. When I upgraded to 1 gig internet, I was pulling around 450mbps on my PC Engines apu1d4. I ended up getting a Ubiquiti Unifi Secure Gateway and then I was able to pull the full 1 gig.

It's pretty hard to recommend Unifi based on how they handled this breach, but the hardware itself has performed very well. Hopefully the new PC Engines boards can accommodate your needs.

Looks like the 1d4 used a Realtek network card while their latest boards use Intel which I guess is the recommended brand for pfsense/OPNsense.

You can connect the Google mesh routers together with Ethernet. I’d guess other competing products will do the same. It’s cheaper and much simpler than a full Ubiquiti setup for a few access points.

How are you going to centrally manage the meshing and transition between APs?

I use a small, passively cooled x86 box with 6 1GbE ports that I found on AliExpress. Wrote about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/hzvfih/new_router_...

It's got a quad-core i5. I run Proxmox and virtualize VyOS as a router, Home assistant, and a couple of other small things like an https reverse proxy for various services that I like to access remotely.

Went this route after my old OpenWRT router couldn't keep up with gigabit WAN. This box has no problems doing so, and even does WireGuard at near wire speed.

There are a bunch of similar units available on Aliexpress, as well as 1U units with x86 CPUs and SFP ports for 10GbE, etc.

I recommend PC Engines if you want something with a bit more support:

https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

They’re small passively cooled embedded x86 machines. They haven’t made the jump to 10GBit, and their newest model (the apu2) is getting pretty old. However, they have very long production timeframes (many years) for each board config, which leads to stability over time.

as you said, it's an embedded solution, and it's cpu power is borderline for gige speeds, if you want more than the bare minimum (fw/nat) like qos, dpi or some virtualized services.

Have you looked at DANOS?

I have an ER4 which works for now but plan to go down the custom route once the ER4 is unable to push packets quickly enough. My hope is that VyOS/DANOS is sufficiently stable by then to run as a VM on say a Odroid H2+ replacement (or something similar)

Vyos has been sufficiently stable for a while now. Just depends on what version you want to run.

I know quite a few companies that use it in production.

Does this type of setup support a mesh network with multiple APs and SSIDs, VLANs, etc? I have never seen a PC based all-in-one interface that supports all of these things the way Unifi does...

Not really. These don't make great APs; the wifi radio is in client mode.

> So the question for becomes: is there just not a good enthusiast market for this stuff?

No. They just don't want to serve the low end. I'm from SK, Canada and the vast majority of all businesses are small businesses. This site [1] says 98%. The problem is they only account for about 25% of the GDP, so vendors don't consider them worth serving. Everyone wants to sell to the 2% of the businesses that make up 75% of the GDP.

There's a lot of money to be made in the small business sector. It's just not *enough* money for huge tech companies.

1. https://www.bizadv.ca/by-the-numbers-saskatchewan-business-s...

And now that OTV's gone, it's even harder to get semi-OK gear (that can be immediately re-flashed with OpenWRT) for a reasonable price. :(

[Hi from Regina!]

I've thought for a while that the neglect of consumer, prosumer, and small business computing is a side effect of concentration of wealth. A small percentage of businesses have all the money.

You often do not need long sales processes to get those small companies, they tend to self serve selling to themselves.

I do casual work for a person that serves that sector. It’s 100% self serve for us. We’ll pay fair value for stuff and vendors won’t ever need to interact with us. The problem is when those vendors think their firmware updater is worth a $10 / month subscription. It’s not.

For example with pfSense going closed source we’d be willing to pay around $100 total lifetime cost to put it on PCEngines hardware. We can build that in to the upfront cost of the device. I wouldn’t be shocked if they try for $50-$100 / year which won’t be economically viable for our market, so instead of getting $100 / device and never interacting with us, we’ll end up moving to a different product. I really hope they come up with an offering that’s appealing to the small business sector, but I’m not holding my breath and I’ll be learning opnsense as a contingency.

As a former enthusiast in this area, I need the time for other more pressing interests and have reverted my home network to Eeros pinned to an IQrouter. All of them require some central service to operate, and I rarely if ever have to pay any attention to them. They also provide better coverage and less radio interference than the prior gold standard, Apple Airport devices. The IQ runs some sort of ssh *nix variant and the only time I’ve ever had to call Eero support was to turn off 5GHz for a minute^ to pair a smarthome device.

Still, it’s nice to have a hobby, and if you’re looking for one, run your own, sure! No shame in that. But it’s no longer necessary, and that’s pretty swell to me.

^ I agree with why they don’t make that accessible to end users: because people will uselessly fiddle with settings knobs to feel empowered, knobs like “separate 2.4 and 5 networks” (which breaks roaming and makes users incorrectly blame their WiFi routers when PEBCAK is at fault) that semi-expert users feel qualified to mess with, and lazy technicians will use to create “guest” networks that don’t offer protection and perform miserably due to being locked to 5GHz.

Maybe you and I have different opinions of "enthusiast" in this context. There is really only so much you're going to do on a home network. You set it up and once it's going, it requires very little maintenance. I would not consider running my own network gear a "hobby" any more than I would consider restaining my deck a "hobby". It's largely a one-time project.

I do have requirements beyond what the typical consumer does of their network, like PoE to run a couple of access points, PPPoE so that I can put my modem in bridge mode, the desire to configure extra DNS records, dynamic DNS since my home IP changes. Oh, and let's not forget some filtering/rewriting capabilities so that I can force modern smart TVs to respect the DNS server I provide them.

My network is much more usable having put the time into it. Yes, you could buy some off the shelf thing and get an OK experience, but that wasn't good enough for me.

I used to do all of those things on homebuilt FreeBSD routers for a commercial ISP we built and ran for a few years back in the day, and now I do them on my off-the-shelf router so that I don’t have to maintain the OS or link-shaping, I just click Update Now once in a while and it autoadapts to local congestion.

All of these features are available out of the box and have a GUI intelligent enough to offer a text area for adding filtering/rewriting commands that exceed the GUI’s remit. I used to have to hand-build this. Now I can plug and play it, and end up with the same experience as someone who built their own server and OS, using the same open source components as they would.

Total time invested, 8 hours over 5 years. I’m content with that exchange, and it has come with the only drawback being “it cost money to purchase the router itself”. I could DIY for less expensive in dollars and more expensive in hours. That’s the hobby-or-not choice, as I see it.

I do not decry those who invest time instead. Good, do so! I invested thousands of hours of my life into DIY of this stuff. It was invaluable experience, but it’s no longer mandatory to DIY to get a great experience indistinguishable from DIY.

> the prior gold standard, Apple Airport devices

It would seem the market is RIPE for them to come back into the wifi market with a mesh product.

I'm guessing that they're just not interested in making infrastructure products anymore, only the client devices. Airport is discontinued, all backend/server devices are discontinued.

They do sell mesh wifi products from Eero, Linksys and Netgear on their shop, but I don't think there's going to be any Apple-branded network gear anytime soon.

Do they make an Eero yet with more than two Ethernet ports? I love the product, I just want to plug 4-5 devices in as well as use the WiFi.

You can buy a 5-port unmanaged switch for roughly $30, just FYI.

To add the unstated testimony: I have two Eeros connected to an 8-port switch and they handle it just fine.

Check the Openwrt table of hardware[0] for a well supported device, and you're good to go. Seriously, there is no good vendor software in this space, but the consumer hardware can actually work fine with better firmware.

Generic Linux or BSD boxes are ok as routers, but they're not the best switches since they start taking up a lot of space if you need a bunch of NICs.

[0] https://openwrt.org/toh/start

Is there a filtered version of that list with hardware that you can currently buy (new)? Or ratings of which current hardware is great for OpenWRT?

Yes! https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128

OpenWRT. Been using that in my home net for the past 12 years or so, on multiple generations of various hardware.

The latest incarnation on linksys ea8500 is slightly bumpy (seems like a kernel crash), but didn’t get annoying enough yet to hook up the serial console and get into kernel bug hunting, yet.

I have about a dozen VLANS that are distributed between different SSIDs and a few L2 switches for wired; bonjour gateway/filtering for the stuff like AirPrint.

Ive seen someone have a fair bit of success with Grandstream AP's. The controller runs on an AP itself or on their router if memory serves me right. I believe they are also moving into the switch market later this year.

I've been running Asus routers with Tomato firmware and other than seemingly inevitable hardware quality issues it has been smooth sailing

Me too, but not really an alternative - the original tomato isn’t even updated any more, and it’s only configurable in its web ui, so it’s really only for home use.

When did link aggregation become "fancy corporate garbage"?

Garbage was a bit of an indulgent word. It certainly is relevant and useful technology. It just isn't useful for home users, at least none that I've ever met.

It is as useful at home as it is anywhere else. Failures just cost less at home.

All my switches are bonded to one another, and it was handy when something snapped one of the fiber runs. That side of the house kept connectivity until the weekend when I could crawl around and run a new cable. (Never did figure out why it broke, though. Guessing the house shifted in just the right way.)

It would have hardly been the end of the world if I had to wait, but if your kit can do it, why would you not?

I mean, sure. If you have the capability and the inclination, go for it. I live in a house that is quite large and I can't come close to fully populating a 24 port switch in a useful way.

I would not detract from your network going the extra mile. I suspect that for most people, the value-to-effort ratio of link aggregation just isn't there in a residential setting.

I think the enthusiasts still buy tiny PC's with Wifi cars and run Linux/FreeBSD/whatever.

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