Hello folks,
Recently moved to a new flat and have been rethinking my networking stack. Current stack is a full tp-link omada setup:
- Router: ER605
- Switch: 8-port TL-SG2008P
- Controller: OC200
- First AP: EAP610 Wifi
- Second AP: EAP615-Wall Wifi 6
While this has been functional and reliable, i cannot stand the UI, its slow and sluggish and overall hasn’t been a great experience to configure. Therefore i am now looking to swap this out with something new.
My inital thought was to swap this out with the equivalent Unifi gear. However, OPNsense was recently updated and has never looked juicier. Im torn between the these two choices and unsure what hardware to go for. Unifi is tempting as it looks amazing and is easy to configure. OPNsense is tempting as it is open-source, not enterprise thus less prone to enshitification, and likely to be cheaper too.
My use case is: 2 people, 10 devices ish in total, for a flat of 85 square meteres. Got a few different serveres, two desktops, 3 phones, tv, laptops etc. Servers, deskrops and tv will go wired, rest is wireless.
I am by no means a professional, but not a total noob either. Looking to set up wireguard tunnel, vlans for different devices and guest network.
I would love some input on this to would weigh in on my final desicion. What are you running, are you hapoy with it, are you looking to change, etc…
Thanks in advance for any tips or recommendations!
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I just bought some UniFi gear for the first time. Cloud gateway fiber, u7 pro xgs and u7 long range.
Really like the dashboard, configuration, vlan.
Really dislike the WiFi APs, they’re AWFUL on range/speed. Updated, tweaked settings, Ethernet backhaul… I had better and more reliable coverage with a single ASUS router (but the asus firmware was terrible). A synology mesh worked pretty reliably too but no >2.5gbps wan port.
I also wish their DNS was more full featured. I haven’t dug into this much, maybe it is something I can do by SSHing into router, been too busy trying to get the WiFi improved.
Not annoyed enough to return the gear but really disappointed with WiFi performance.
Not knowing what your goal is, I’ll start with this: I had very similar hardware to you, and while I was fine with the Omaha Ui, I just never could get it setup how I needed or wanted. I had the er605v2, 3 eap615 wall WiFi 6 apps, and a switch for PoE from the Omaha line but don’t recall the model. I just finally gave up on it, and moved the er605 and wall WiFi APs to OpenWRT. Setup my network with a dumb PoE switch and 4 VLANs and haven’t looked back. It all just works and I almost never mess with it. I’m not saying it wasn’t a little work initially, but it’s been worth it. I’ve now added a 4th wall WIFI (just download a backup of an existing one, install openWRT and restore to the new one. Change the IP and done.) I added two managed PoE Switches with OpenWRT as well. So it’s allowing me to grow as I need to.
If you’re in the omada ecosystem, a one-off unifi device is going to frustrate you. They’re trying to wrangle you into buying shit like this: https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/up-floodlight
Which part is slow? I run a software controller in a proxmox VM and it is plenty quick. My router is an opnsense vm and has 8 ryzen 7700x threads assigned to it, so no problems there 😁
I’m using Mikrotik and Ruckus. Would recommend both. I like that they are both at the level of reliability that I don’t think about them at all for months at a time. I update quarterly or less and they require no other attention from me. They also work well with my centralized data collection and alerting via LibreNMS.
OPNSense would be high on my list of alternatives when I reevaluate next time. And all Mikrotik would be a good option for me as well. Their Wi-Fi gear is not as strong as Ruckus or Ubiquiti, but they are super solid.
The Unifi ecosystem is a bit too centralized for me. I don’t want to create an account in order to use the hardware.
I used to run PFSense ( pretty much the same as Opensense ) and really liked it but moved over to Ubiquity in the last year or so. Here’s my 2 cents…
Go with Ubiquity if you want a single unified interface for managing all your devices. You’ll have “soft vendor lock in”, their kit will work just fine with a mix of hardware but it’s best if everything is Ubiquity
Go with Opensense if you want complete flexibility in the kit you’re using. I feel likeI had more fine grained control with PFSense than I do with Ubiquity but I think that’s a symptom of how the UI/UX rather than the features
You can do the same stuff with both options. I’m very happy with my Ubiquity set up, I don’t see myself changing anything anytime soon
And stay away from pfSense.
While this has been functional and reliable, i cannot stand the UI, its slow and sluggish and overall hasn’t been a great experience to configure.
Router: ER605
If your issue is just the Web UI on the router, most network hardware that I’ve run into has some kind of CLI interface.
kagis
It sounds like you can set up SSH to the thing.
First you have to enable “Remote Assistance” which apparently enables SSH access. Then SSH into your router
ssh user@routerIPI noticed on a mac that Ventura no longer accepts lower hashes so you have to update the ssh config file on Mac’s (and perhaps other Distros) with the following:
sudo nano /etc/ssh/ssh_configthen add to the bottom:
HostkeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa <<enter new line as I don’t know how to edit in this forum>> PubkeyAcceptedAlgorithms +ssh-rsa
Then Save.
When you log in you have to enter the command EN (to enable, similar to a cisco router)
From there, type help.
Thats as far as I’ve gotten. Help shows a bunch of config and show options.
After you have entered “en” for enable, you can enter “configure” to get to config options. Type help after Configure, lots of options there.
