Where did everything began?
So, we were living the life, we had this cheap and old Asus wifi-router handling all our network needs. It didn’t do much, and it did it badly. We had numerous problems with 5Ghz band just dropping, and coming back up like a minute later.
I tried almost everything I could, all kind of settings, rebooting. Nothing worked. But it was doing it’s job, so we didn’t mind that much.
But then everything changed. We moved and I wanted to upgrade our Internet to 600Mbps. And after doing the deed online, I was perplexed with how I wasn’t getting the speed I wanted. And after a few minutes (or hours, my mind is fuzzy when I do something obviously stupid) of poking around, lo and behold. Our WiFi-router only has 100Mbps WAN-port. So as I wanted faster internet, I wasn’t going to just revert the speed, but get new equipment that would fix the problem, that I caused in the first place.
Thought process on how to choose good stuff?
So, this lead to the rabbit hole, do you just buy another shitty Asus WiFi-router? Do you buy an expensive but shitty Asus WiFi-router? Or do you build and actual Network in your home with “proper” network gear?
So I did my fair share of googling, and ended up with these ideas:
- I want separate Router, WiFi Router and Switch.
- I want them to be from a reputable Networking Company.
- I want a proper network.
Why these requirements? Because I wanted to separate all the equipment from each other. If I have a solid and good router, but I want to update my WiFi to handle new WiFi 6E, I shouldn’t need to renew everything. I wanted to be able to update each piece of my network piece-by-piece if and when I needed.
I also wanted something from a reputable networking company, someone who actually knows their stuff, instead of shitty Asus WiFi-routers which are just garbage in plastic boxes with lot’s of antennas.
And the last one? What is a proper network? Well, for home it might not be nothing much, but I wanted more control. More authority over how my network behaved. So even if I didn’t need anything, I wanted something like: VPN, VLAN, Firewall.
I didn’t plan on anything with them, but I figured, if the equipment I buy, has these capabilities, no matter what kind of a situation in the future I end up with, I’m fairly certain I can handle all kinds of situations and figure out them at that time.
Choosing the right company makes all the difference
So now that you have some vague idea about how to choose the gear. You have to choose what company to go with. Since you want all different kind of gear, you could, but you really shouldn’t, mix and match with different vendors. So you have to choose a company who you trust, and that you think will work with you, and that you are comfortable with using.
For me after doing some googling, there was two different companies:
- Ubiquity
- TP-Link
So my first instinct was to choose ubiquity, like, why not? They are a reputable company, they are enterprise grade, and they do have some cheap routers you can pick and choose.
But after doing some reading, cost analysis, I was blown away. Not only was ubiquity expensive, but I found a lot of complaints how bad they actually work. And on top of this, you need to know how to use ssh/cli commands to configure everything. Yes they have some nifty UI’s, but especially with the “home-network gear” EdgeRouter X. It’s bad as shit.
Now was the time, even if I like tinkering, making everything work and get more fun factor. Networking is something that should work, 100% of the time. It should be reliable and fast. And if something happens, you need to be sure you can fix everything fast. Like, it’s the one thing you don’t mess with and choose poorly.
So with this, I went with TP-Link. Yeah, it might have this more HomeNetworkey reputation. It’s not as enterprisey as ubiquity. But if it works and is more reliable, cheaper and you can buy it from almost everywhere. For me it was quite an easy choice.
So my network equipment was to be:
- Router ER605
- Switch SG108 -> Upgraded to SG2008 later for Omada Controller support.
- WiFi-Router EAP225
Why these? Well, they were cheap, I could buy them from my local supplier, and they didn’t look too bad.
Complimentary requirements for overall networking
So the first complimentary requirement was easy. You want PoE -capabilities in your network. Why? Because it makes life easier and nicer. I wanted a PoE capable Wifi-Router so that I would only need to make sure I can get RJ45 cable to the router. I didn’t want to put too much cable in to the wall, and I wanted a nice looking setup where the actual Router blends in to the walls.
But in the end, after I chose TP-Link and figured that EAP225 actually comes with it’s own PoE -adapter, I was like, yeah, this works. You do need to make sure you can provide the power to the router. But for us, we had a power socket next to the network socket where I would draw the line for our wifi-router, so even our house was ready for this.
But the second requirement, which was a complete accident. If you want to manage your network properly, you want something to do it with? Like, yeah, you can just log into the router and do router configuration in there, and then log in to the wifi-router and do configuration there. But it gets totally uninteresting and messy.
To the resque: Omada Controller.
What it is, is a configuration software for your whole network. You configure the controller, and then let the controller configure all your networking gear. This is the same that ubiquity does with their controllers.
What this gives me is, total control of my hardware over one piece of software. I can manage and define as many VLAN’s as I want, I can control DHCP reservations in there. And my whole network actually works as one large network, with different equipment just doing their piece.
So what now that everything is running?
So now that everything has been running for a little over year? Well for one, everything works flawlessly. I get full internet speed be it Wifi or LAN connection.
Everything that can, is connected to Switch. This is more about fun, but I do like that LAN is more reliable, and even if a little, it lowers the congestion of the WiFi-channel I’m using. So only actually wireless clients are using WiFi, laptops, phones, etc.
And everything has happened, like I wanted. We have a really nicely installed WiFi-Router that blends to the wall and the only cable is one RJ45. My router is fast as lightning and I rarely experience any difficulties. TP-Link has been nice and has provided me lot’s of software updates, which at least for me, have not degraded anything.
But the best part came with a new feature I wanted.
VPN for the win!
So I came to the conclusion I wanted to access my home network from outside of home. And after fumbling a bit, and forgetting I could do VPN connections, or that they even existed. I thought that yes, this is what I need, and hopefully it’s going to be as easy as I’m hoping.
So I came home from work. Ready to get this sorted and using hours upon hours for this. And what actually happened was as anticlimactic as it should be with a proper network.
I launched Omada Controller. Defined a new OpenVPN connection, using a local authentication schema. Downloading the .opvn file. And connecting to the the VPN.
And then everything just worked. I connected, and everything just worked. I could connect to my local Home Assistant instance. I could access my local Raspberry PI -server. Everything just worked.
Yes, I ended up doing some more configuration, what network address to use for VPN, and what not. But overall the experience was underwhelming. And I think that is a good experience when you’re talking about networking. Like I said in the beginning, I want everything to work, and just do that.