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Comment by stilisstuk | Hacker News Reader

So I don't know about routers or networks. I live in a an apartment. Which router (+ a extra point / 2 hub mesh) is recommended these days. There seems to be a plethora of options. But most of always end with ubiquity, which today feels like a bad choice. Also kind of expensive. Preferable something Completely local. No cloud service. Preferable opens source.

I live in EU.

(Sorry if it's bad form to ask for product recommendations, but I am unhappy with/ don't trust, my isp provided router, and gp explicitly mentions buying a router)

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I've replied to a couple of others, normally I would have recommended Ubiquiti, but I no longer do. Not just because of their recent breach debackle, but because their software quality has declined since some of their best developers left.

The short but not so useful answer is, run something with pfSense or similar, I hear PCEngines hardware works well and is open source from the bootloader up.

Ubiquiti has hardware offloading using Cavium hardware so you need to get some throughout tests if you need high bandwidth in hardware without the offloading hardware.

Pfsense isn’t a replacement for ubiquity if you want a single plane for firewall switch’s and aps - I don’t know if any reasonable one sadly

I can recommend PC Engines (though a bit pricey, and kind of a hobby project to set up), and also Ubiquiti (ignoring the recent debacle).

Both are generally maintenance free once they’re set up.

Considering linksys WRT3200ACM. Heard pfsense is not good with wireless.

I switched to pfsense* from a WRT. Awful router! It uses a cloud service to log in and nine times out of ten the awfulness that is their app cannot "locate a Linksys router on the network" even from a phone using the routers WiFi. I even tried flashing OpenWRT which was much better but the hardware still sucked and had to be restarted often. Cannot recommend (sadly I did recommend it to a friend before I knew how awful it is and he has the exact same problems even though he owns a different WRT model (1900 I think)).

* I'd recommend OPNsense over pfsense. If nothing else then because they break licenses (pfsense is NOT open source as they claim. You cannot built from the sources they provide).

Although netgate’s recent debacle calls into question the code quality of pfsense as well:

https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2021-March/00649...

I'm pretty sure the WRT-54G I had in 2005 was better at penetrating walls than anything Ubiquiti has ever built. After dealing with the one my mother was issued for her remote work I'm convinced that anyone not trying to remote-admin a hundred-router campus installation would be a fool to buy one.

Nothing is where you expect it to be. Getting to the control panel requires multiple login screens. Changing a port forwarding rule for devices that are and are not currently connected not only isn't on the same screen, it's not even in the same section of the control panel.

I had no end of problems getting it up and running for her, despite having paid tech support on the phone. Everything connected via ethernet would benchmark at exactly 1/2 the normal download speed of her old router, and anything on wifi benchmarked at 1/6. For the first three days her IP phone just rang continuously with nobody there, and neither I nor the tech support guy have any idea why it started working correctly.

Can you get rid of your ISP provided router? There are lots of obstacles there.

I don't know to be honest?

Mikrotik

The ux is... not good and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone not experienced

yeah i bought Mikrotik for home and i have no idea what to do there. I tried to do hairpin nat with it and after 3 tutorials i somehow managed to get it working and now i have no clue how does it work or what its it really doing.

I think its only for real networking pros

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