Re-vamped my home network again
- Thread starter redhat
- Start date
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Wow, I am surprised at this "extra mile" approach here with the NAT for DNS to hide the true DNS server address. I just gave the DNS server a presence on each VLAN with firewall rules on the host permitting only port 53.
I did a home networking project this weekend also. I got tired of having my fiber ONT and firewall in one area, my NAS in another, and 4 different switches scattered throughout the house. I got this 16U rack and a new old stock Brocade 48 port POE switch, wall mounted it in a seldom used area of our basement, ran power, and have started moving things to the new location. I got far enough to get the internet back on before the rest of the family returned from a shopping trip, but I still have a lot of wire to pull to connect the WAPs and cameras (and eliminate the other switches).
The plot thickens....I got my hands on a Ruckus R750 AP today. This weekend I am going to swap out my Aruba AP22 and see if I notice any difference in the "fringe" areas of our house.
Cool. My R720 covers my whole (small) house without issues. If you ever get another Ruckus, you could use the 750 as a master.
Nice! I had that era Dell for ages, 12th gen was solid. Beyond that forever and a day Lifecycle Controller initialization. I had a T320 pretty maxed out.
Never worked with Ruckus APs but have heard them mentioned a lot. Hope you have a nice time and they work well. Have only personally used old Aironets, Meraki, UniFi, Aruba Instant On and regular Aruba.
I like that size rack. How do you like the Brocade switches?
I have an ICX7250 in my picture above. Brocade is solid and easy to work with. Just about any transreceiver works with them.
They're very well documented at STH.
I'll upgrade to a 740 at some point, but so far it has been very reliable.
The build quality seems really good. I am not familiar with the commands for the CLI, so I had to get some help from AI to get POE enabled for some of the ports.
I just plugged the Ruckus R750 in and updated the firmware. I will play with it more in the next few days.
The R750 is alive. Wow - this thing is putting a strong signal throughout my house. I set it up with a new SSID so I could switch back and forth with my existing setup. It appears that I may be able to get away with 1 or two less AP’s in the house.
Thats great, yeah enterprise APs just rock. I would assume you'll see even better performance once your old AP/wireless router is taken out of the equation.
My wireless access point lineage has gone line this: moved into the house in 2019, translated a cheap TP-Link wireless router. Worked ok but was meh. Then I got some UniFi Long-Range APs, then went to Aruba Instant On AP22, now Aruba AP-535 running in Instant mode. The AP12 was awesome over the wireless router, but that also had to do with the fact that it was mounted in the highest-center most point of the house (attic).
The new AP-535 has the same coverage (if not slightly better) than the AP12, but I really notice the beauty of its 4x4 (or maybe its 8x8) radios giving the house much better throughput.
I don't have much of an opinion on the UniFi setup I ran as I think I had the "three horseman" of a bad setup... improperly optimized, main AP in upstairs office and a living room AP meshed/wireless backhaul to that upstairs AP and buggy firmware. So I can't speak to how well it worked. I'm sure UniFi is great now.
I guess my whole text above is just my fondness of not running a wireless router and the performance you can get on "next-to-nothing" retired Enterprise APs.
I have removed the two Aruba AP22s from my house, and also removed the 3rd from the garage. The Ruckus R750 nearly covers all of it, the only exception is a basement office that was previously served by the second AP22. This basement area has a large brick chimney and has always been a trouble spot for WIFI. The R750 does do a better job in this area (vs. a single AP22 in the same location), but it still isn't enough for me to have confidence I would not have dropped calls, etc. The immediate solution is an ethernet cable, but I will soon have a Ruckus R350 installed in this area. No need for another AP in the garage, it seems to have a reliable signal from the R750 in the center of the house. Overall I am impressed with the performance of the Ruckus hardware, and I like the web interface. There are a TON of settings available, but so far the defaults are working good.
