Hello dear selfhosters,
I’m planning to step up my WiFi game and after some research I feel a little lost. do have questions.
At the moment with an all in one router (a fritzbox ) and a WiFi range extender the coverage is not sufficient and the extended connection not reliable enough. So I plan to get two wireless access points. That would be all for now, in the future I am thinking about switching to opensense to get vlan support - I’d like to have one for iot devices, one for kids, one for guests.
The questions for now: If using access points with a software controler (I.e. T-Link EAP653 or UbiquitI U6+) can I just plug these into the router, turn WiFi in the router off and have the access points handle the WiFi? But IP addresses will still be assigned by the router, right? I don’t want to leave the router WiFi running with the same ssid because this will affect the smoth transition between access points managed by the software controler? If the software controller is down for whatever reason, will the WiFi still work?
Questions for later: Will opensense be able to handle vlans for WiFi connected decices or do they need to be configured in the controler software? Are the access points I mentioned suitable? I want WiFi6, not willing to spend more then double for WiFi6e, max 15-20 devices in the network, no cloud controller, generally I prefer open systems. Any better suggestions for devices?
Answers also to a single question are very much appreciated!
Have you ever flashed an upgrade to one of these boards? The directions on the wiki aren’t very clear and doesn’t explain the difference between flashing to the NAND or eMMC. Do they not support installing from a standard USB memory stick? The wiki seems to suggest this has a standard linux command line, does THAT support inline upgrading?
Also, any experience with the BPI mini? It looks like about the same hardware but in a smaller package, and for my own purposes this would be all I’m looking for (basically just provide the wifi connection via an ethernet port, I have DHCP, DNS, and everything else already covered from my firewall), or would you have any suggestions for something else?
Start by reading this comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/4966625
What explanation do you need? You’ve multiple images, one for each storage type, pick whatever you would like to use and use it.
Never used that one. I’m not even sure about what board you’re talking about. Look up on the supported hardware table if it is supported and how good the support is.
There is 128MB of NAND and 8GB of eMMC… so does that mean one version is very barebones and the other version is feature-rich? I just don’t see anything explaining why you should choose one over the other, especially when both storage chips are part of the board and not upgrade options.
This is the BPI-R3 mini board I was referring to. The main difference I see is that it only has the pair of 2.5Gbps ethernet ports and does not include the five gigabit ports, so it’s in a much smaller package.