Hi, I hope its appropriate to ask this here, considering this is the most active community closest to this topic (Networking). I am moving places shortly and will need to start from scratch will all networking equipment. Including router and wifi-extenders. Am wondering what the general consencus is around networking gear, what brands are good and homelab friendly? I’ve heard great things about Ubiquity, but know nothing about their products. I do wish to buy a mesh system, as I do have 2 floors and concrete walls in the new place. I am looking for something easy to maintain, yet customizable for when I get more comfortable with playing around with networking equipment.
I have some experience with TP-link + decos, but really dont like their app and default settings. Blocks mullvad.net by default for instance…
If it matters, there will only be 2 people connected normally ~ approx 8 devices or so in total.
- 2 phones,
- 2 laptops (wired if possible)
- 1 desktop comupter (wired)
- server (wired)
- Nvdia shield (wired)
- RaspberriPi (wired)
Am also aiming to buy a 1000/1000 Mbps connection :)
Lemmy know what you would recommend in this scenario, and please feel free to ask about further details if I have missed anything, Thanks as always!
I was definitely leery of Ubiquity for that reason since before 2020. Even though back then it could all be local, I feel like pushing people to the cloud was already well-established as being a thing.
My criteria for routers and wi-fi access points up to this point has basically been “can run OpenWRT and is relatively cheap,” so I’ve settled in on TP-Link. I’m still running on an old Archer C7 from a decade(?) ago and would like to have something that fits in my rack for aesthetic purposes, though, so my next router might be a 1U DIY x86 machine running OPNsense instead.
It’s getting harder to find routers that will run open source firmware. The best option is to run OPNsense or pfSense on a low power x86 machine and use separate APs for WiFi.