EDIT - 11.1.2024 - I have changed many of the equipment choices listed below, which will be another blog post. The equipment from FS has been a total disaster, and the Qotom firewall, while effective, lacked the usability I really wanted in such an important device. The FS wireless equipment is likely to be e-waste, which is horrible, but the Qotom will live on, just in a different role
We’re in the process of moving from our apartment to a house to call our own. It will be somewhere I can drill holes, make improvements, and really nerd-out. The new spot has, if you can believe it, access to symmetric 2 Gigabit internet service for under $100/month. Ordering a service at this speed is unnecessary for me, as it is for most people, and actually is likely to be more of a hassle than a value. What I should do is NOT order that speed, order something a bit slower, save a few dollars, and keep my focus on more pressing issues.
Obviously, I ordered this 2Gb speed and organized things so that the installer was at the house as soon as it was mine. (Literally. He called during the closing because he was early and I wasn’t there yet)
The first hurdle to solve is the router/firewall I’ll use to connect to this service. I was initially planning to get something from Protecli but their least expensive option with an SFP+ port was beyond what I was willing spend. I have no doubt it’s a great unit, and worth the money, but not for me. I don’t need to push 10Gb of traffic with powerful filtering, etc., I’m just looking to get access to my 2Gb of speed and hoping I can find a way to connect the fiber optic cable directly to my firewall. I want something I can try to setup with a XG PON or XGS PON SFP. I don’t know if this will be possible, but I didn’t want to buy a firewall that wouldn’t at least let me try.
The unit I’ve purchased is a Qotom Q20321G9-1U, which has 5x 2.5Gb Ethernet jacks, 4x 10Gb SFP+ ports, and is based around the Intel C3558R processor. I separately purchased 16GB of RAM and a pair of very cheap 256GB SSDs. I was planning to buy 128GB disks, which was already way over kill, but they were $17 each, while the 256GB disks were $19. It seemed a waste not to ‘upgrade’. I don’t expect to need anything like that amount of storage space, but it’ll be nice to have it available if needed. I installed OpnSense on the unit, and used the installer to setup the disks in a ZFS mirror. With so little storage space in use, I expect these disks will last me a good long time.
The only real issue I ran into with the setup of this device with OpnSense was with the serial port. Even though this unit has a VGA port, and USB ports for a keyboard, I still prefer that my routers have a serial console. (It’s my house, and I can do what I like! 🙂 ). The system has a console port on an RJ45 jack, which works great in BIOS, and I used the serial installer for OpnSense. Frustratingly, the serial console was flaky after the installation. It would stop outputting during the boot process, would never allow me to interact with the OpnSense system. And the whole unit would lock up during boot when it was enabled about 50% of the time. The fix for this was simply to disable UEFI boot and go back to ‘Legacy’. Once I made that swap the system boots normally, and the serial console works like a charm. Perhaps that will get addressed in a future firmware update, but for now this is working great.
I’ve ordered what I think will be the right SFP+ adapter for the fiber optic service, but only time will tell if that will work. I’ve based the purchase on random internet reports of the hardware others have received from this ISP to convert the fiber to copper. Based on the spec of those devices, and what I know about the service I’ve ordered, I think I have a shot at success. But, to my understanding, having compatible hardware is no guarantee.
With the router portion addressed, it was time to consider the remaining networking within the house; A house approaching it’s 180th birthday. It was built in a time before indoor plumbing, let alone electrification, and I want to try and minimize the amount of time and money that needs to be spent wiring the house for my nerdy desires. To help with that, I’m leaning toward putting wireless access points in that also include network switches. What I want are APs that connect over 2.5Gb and have a couple of network ports built in for downstream devices. Those two requirements have severely limited my options, or should I say option. So far as I can tell, only Unifi makes a device that meets the requirements. The device is called the ‘U6-Enterprise-IW’ and are ruinously expensive at $300/each. The house is not massive so wireless coverage is not a big concern. I’ll end up placing these, or similar units, in spots where I am looking for wired connections. Places like the living room, office areas, etc., and I expect wireless signal will be plenty strong as a result.
I was able to find another company making a similar device, the AP-N515H from FS, which is what I ended up buying in the end. Like the Unifi device, it is WiFi 6, has a 2.5Gb uplink port and four switch ports with one offering PoE. I ordered three of these, and though it’s in no way required, I also purchased a wireless controller, the AC-1004. I was curious to see how their platform worked, and the idea of easy roaming hand offs throughout the house was too fun an idea not to test!
Finally, I’ll need something to connect all of this hardware together. When I was leaning toward Unifi, it left me few options. They do have a ‘Pro Max’ line of 2.5Gb switches but they are very expensive and offer limited numbers of 2.5Gb ports. Instead, I went with the TP-Link SG3218XP-M2. These are 16 port switches, with all 16 ports being 2.5g, and 8 of them offering PoE+ power. They also have a pair of 10Gb SFP+ ports too. I ordered a pair of these, which was a little more money than the Unifi gear, but since they are fully 2.5Gb I thought the value was there.
I use a lot of Unifi gear professionally, but when it came down to what I would install in my home, I preferred not to need their controller hardware, or software. Unifi prioritizes their platform for metrics, logging, etc., but I prefer to use opensource tooling to solve those same issues. I want to pull network metrics via SNMP, and in the testing I did with their controller and hardware at home, I had a lot of trouble getting reliable syslog messages to flow to my syslog server.
For my current setup, none of my configuration is done via any cloud based apps. While both TP-Link and FS offer that, I have chosen not to set it up. I am using the local interfaces for config, and standards based tooling for metrics.
The equipment, so far, lives in the dining room but as we get settled it will move into a better spot. There is a bit of wiring to do to get this old house where I need it but I’m really looking forward to that. I have some CAT6 cabling arriving in a few days and I expect I’ll spend a bit of time this weekend fishing cables through dirt crawl spaces and bring connectivity to where I need it.
I spent many weeks mulling over what equipment to buy and it was only as I went to hit the ‘purchase’ button that I realized Unifi would not ever be something I was happy with. The path I’ve chosen is not the easier of the two, but was easy ever really the goal?