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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

I bought a used Ruckus R610 on ebay for a modest $160 (not including power adapter). I am extremely happy with the hardware performance and the stability and options of the Unleashed firmware.

It says it supports a gateway mode, but as a power user I want a bit more control than what I would expect a WAP to offer. I use an EdgeRouter-4 running whatever the latest official release is. Having separate boxes grants me freedom to do things like mess with Wi-Fi settings while my SO watches a show on Apple TV connected via Ethernet. It's the little things.

I often think of a pfSense build, but then I remember how happy I am with the performance and efficiency of a dedicated box.

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FWIW, I do OPNsense on a dedicated box (Protectli FW4B) and then an R610 for wireless, with an eBay special EOL'd Brocade switch in the middle.

A dumber switch would be just fine, but I wanted something with 802.1at POE and good VLAN support because I like to break things up a bit.

OPNsense is darned handy, and I like that it does more than an EdgeRouter would, like terminate a Wireguard VPN. The R610 works wonderfully, and the switch... well... it's a switch. Once configured it's kinda transparent.

Moving houses soon, so I got a second R610 to fill in signal on what I perceive will be dead spots due to plaster+lathe construction, and in testing thus far it all seems to Just Work. And like you appreciate, since it's all modular it's a lot easier to maintain than the UniFi stuff when things go sideways.

Very, very happy with this setup.

> I do OPNsense on a dedicated box (Protectli FW4B)

Interesting, thanks. Looks similar to one I'm considering to purchase when I'm moving next year. I'd be using OpnSense too.

https://www.ipu-system.de/index.html

Those look nice as well.

I think that any slim/passive box will work well. So long as it has enough NICs and they have quality drivers for hardware offload and whatnot it'll work great.

Before Ubiquiti turned into a garbage fire my go to recommendation for power/performance/budget was used Ruckus APs and pfSense router.

I own Netgate and run R610s at work and at home, if that says anything.

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