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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

The three stages of an engineer’s relationship with Ubiquiti:

1/ Their APs are so cool! Check out this web interface! I can manage an entire fleet of both of these, all from my home office!

2/ Aha, the APs run Linux and I can ssh to them and upload settings — even cooler!

3/ Er, you know what else runs Linux, has a pair of wired and wireless NICs, and can be managed remotely with plain text files and ssh — literally every SBC on the market for $20.

I run a mixture of UAC PROs and PoE SBCs as APs now. The latter because I’m cheap and I can manage them myself. The former because I’m cheap and refuse to retire something for which I paid $100+ a piece.

Ubiquiti provide some fantastic and well polished products. I thought I needed them, but all I really needed was commodity hardware and a shell script.

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Are there any SBCs which have built in APs that can handle transfers in the hundreds of megabits range?

Good question.

When you have gigabit FIOS backstopped by multi-hundred mbps LTE, several thousand square feet of concrete and metal construction, and actively use (and feel) hundreds of megabits in any given room, even in commercially packaged offerings there are not a lot of consumer or prosumer options.

Of the two that I’ve found: (a) eero Pro (not base), and (b) UDM Pro + Nano HD APs, it comes down to something like iPhone vs. Pixel: how much twiddling do you want to do for entertainment value?

For what it’s worth, I find better sustained up/down WiFi speeds (>600 mbps vs. 450 mbps) through eero Pro, but better sustained up/down wired speeds (>900 mbps vs. >800 mbps) and support for obscure legacy IoT through Ubiquiti UniFi®.

In locations not needing more than one AP, I find monster all-in-one gaming WiFi routers (e.g. Netgear, TP-Link) beat both of them.

I've been considering my options to replace the Unifi controller if things get much worse and OPNsense + some terraform magic sounds like a great option.

What do you use to synchronise the APs and switch configuration? I'm talking things like SSIDs, VLANs, DHCP options etc.

Two SSIDs with RADIUS on one (which assigns VLANs) and guest access on the other.

VLANs at the switch level are handled by consumer NetGear switches. They have an HTTP interface around which one can build a simple API.

Configuration is driven by pushing from a single script. Push is not nearly as malleable as pull but it’s a very stable system. The script handles IPAM and DHCP allocations but almost everything that needs a static address is accessed via the DNS entry for its IPv6 EUI64 address.

Firewall rules between devices and other networks happen at the VLAN / subnet level — the actual IPv4 addresses aren’t needed for the rules themselves.

What $20 SBCs on the market have multiple real network interfaces? I'd love to pick up a few.

Ironically, a second hand Ubiquiti EdgeRouterX is a great platform from which to start building something. Ignore the UI and configure everything from the command line.

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