Thanks for the suggestions on the router post I made a few weeks back! I think I’ll try to repurpose a no longer in use Mac Mini into being my OPNsense router on a VirtualBox VM! If that doesn’t work then I’ll consider buying one of the devices ya’ll mentioned in the last post.
But now I’m trying to look for an access point to flash Openwrt on and a managed switch to do my VLANs. I looked at supported devices on the Openwrt hardware list and looked them up on ebay and started saving some to my watchlist, and now I have a lot of sale offers that are gonna end in 1-2 days.
Based on Openwrt’s suggestions, I tried looking for devices that have at least 128 MB (1024 Mb) of RAM, 32 MB (256 Mb) of Flash, 2 cores, and support both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz connectivity. The specs need to support up to 1 Gbps Ethernet speeds, I haven’t really thought much about the Wi-Fi speed. Mesh isn’t required but I guess it’d be nice for future purposes. We use Cox, but we’re thinking about switching to T-Mobile, idk if it will be fiber (SFPs are expensive right? Sigh…). I want to find something that’s under $100, shipping included. These are the ones I have saved in my list so far (these are the regular listings):
Access Points
As for switches, I just need it to be managed (VLANs), have 4 ports (one for homelab PC, one for the AP, two extra for future). Here’s the ones I looked at:
Switches
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TP-Link Omada ES206GP (6-port, 4 ports are PoE) - ebay link
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Ubiquiti UniFi USG-PRO-4 (4-port, does include two SFP ports) - ebay link
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HP NJ5000-5G (4-port, 2 ports are PoE) - ebay link
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HP MSM720 (4-port, 2 additional SFP ports) - ebay link
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TP-Link ES205GP (5-port, 4 ports are PoE) - ebay link
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Cisco RV220W (4-port) - ebay link
EDIT: I talked with a guy and totally forgot an important point, does reflashing the hardware prevent me from using features with the vendors i listed? I know companies can suck
Please also consider mikrotik brand gear. I’ve been told they’re especially easy to manage as one moves from manual control to something declarative like terraform(opentofu).
128 MB (1024 Mb) of RAM, 32 MB (256 Mb) of Flash
FYI, RAM and flash sold to consumers is always in Bytes (big B); it’s only RAM manufacturers (and EEPROMs) that use the bit (small b) designation for storage volume, I think. If you’re using both to avoid any confusion, I would suggest the following instead: 128 MByte. No one will ever get that confused with megabits, and it’s the same style used for data transfer, which does still use bits: Mbit/sec.
I wish you the best of luck in your search.
EDIT: I talked with a guy and totally forgot an important point, does reflashing the hardware prevent me from using features with the vendors i listed? I know companies can suck
If they’re software features and OpenWRT doesn’t implement them, yes. That’s not really the fault of the hardware manufacturer, though; that’s just a tradeoff you’ve chosen to make.
For example, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to use Ubiquiti’s UniFi or TP-Link’s Omada software-defined networking to manage your OpenWRT-flashed device, but that’s just because OpenWRT hasn’t implemented it, not because installing it trips some kind of DRM fuse or whatever.
(I think OpenWISP might be the OpenWRT-compatible Free Software equivalent for that sort of thing, but I have yet to look into it myself so I’m not sure.)
Otherwise, I haven’t personally heard of any vendors intentionally sabotaging their hardware such that it disables itself when flashed with OpenWRT, but that’s not the same as an affirmative statement that it can’t ever happen.
Openwisp is an orchestration platform, but it is very overwhelming to the home/homelab user and not suitable for someone expecting the Unifi “single pane of glass”. It works best when most devices are the same model, otherwise you’re just making templates for many diferent device types.
Does there exist something more appropriate?
Ansible. At least that I’ve found.
Edit: I use generic commands to do things like update and reboot. O believe there’s an openwrt module for ansible as well, which kicks back a bit more info to ansible.
I’ve found openwrt to be extremely stable and doesn’t need a lot of intervention.
Admittedly I haven’t used Omada even though my gear supported it (before I flashed OpenWRT on it), but I don’t think it bears any resemblance to Ansible except in the most basic sense of being able to accomplish administrative tasks somehow.
What I was expecting was something that would provide a web dashboard showing all of my OpenWRT (and ideally, misc. other devices) at once, maybe with a nice diagram of the network topology and stuff like that.
Oh, I totally understand the software side would be different due to running different firmware, and yeah I wasn’t expecting to be able to use the vendor management systems. I was more worried abiut the hardware, but you cleared that up a bit :)
I’ve never heard of OpenWISP, but I’ll keep it in mind if I’ve ever got a bunch of devices I need to manage!