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by ncphil 1122 days ago
Probably the most painful home Internet experience you can have is a consumer router fail. Suddenly you really need all those basic sysamin features a business system provides. I used OpenWRT on Linksys back in the day, but later had an early PCEngines APU running PfSense. Those worked well enough until my ISP increased our bandwidth. Made the jump to a little Mikrotik RB2011 on the top floor and added an extra AP (actuall a RB 900 series router) on the first. That did the job up until we got 1 Gb fiber. Not willing to use the ISP's router+mesh, I got a Ubiquiti EdgrRouter and a couple of Netgear APs (by then all our switches were ProSafe managed). The ER has been great. After mastering RouterOS, Vyatta was no big deal. I regret now not getting UI APs, Netgear changes its crappy prosumer interface with every model it seems, and they're painful to manage without paying for the cloud service. The switches are OK, but the once again the UX annoyingly varies by model. Of course, Ubiquiti has its own issues mostly in how the company itself is run. If I have to, I'm ready to go back to Mikrotik (whose web ui the Vault 7 goons could only crack during an interlude between firmwares: as if anyone leaves that UI enabled). In all the years I ran it, Mikrotik never caused me a problem with a RouterOS update (neither has EdgeOS).
2 comments
l33tman 1122 days ago
To be fair, "business system features" are no help often, I have a $1200 Netgate pfSense firewall that just failed, probably due to the Intel Atom C2000 bug. I just have to throw it away and buy a new. That it was a business thingy didn't change anything except made it much more expensive to replace.
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rejectfinite 1122 days ago
>Suddenly you really need all those basic sysamin features a business system provides

It's good for a learning experience :)

And now, the ISP routers have caught up imo

I just use that now and it is fine. Plug in as much as possible with Ethernet. If that fails, it's probably a router issue or ISP network issue, and then it's on the ISP side to fix.

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hedora 1122 days ago
In the US, ISPs sell all sorts of network snooping data to advertisers and the police. Letting one of their devices on to your LAN is asking for trouble.
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