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Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Possibly stupid question, but how do people do Wifi with these the wired-only routers? Just buy a normal full-featured Wifi router and let it do its routing, or can you get some dumb AP-only and offload all the routing on the more powerful wired box?

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Almost any WiFi router can be configured as a dumb AP, in the worst case just disable it's DHCP server and plug the patch to one of the LAN ports, not WAN.

A proper AP is usually an overkill for a home usage.

> A proper AP is usually an overkill for a home usage.

So is quad-core 2.2 GHz x86 router with 2x10Gbe, but here we are :)

I have an Intel box as a router, a managed switch and then a Unifi AP - there are certainly more parts, but each component does it's job relatively well.

I have an UniFi AP Nano flashed with OpenWRT which only acts as access point. Highly recommended, it's pretty cheap and has a solid range.

Is it this sort of setup where wifi and lan devices are bridged together? https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/dumbap

Somehow I fell into rabbit hole reading into how OpenWRT apparently is in process of changing how they do switches (related to bridging?), from homebrew swconfig to upstream DSA https://forum.openwrt.org/t/mini-tutorial-for-dsa-network-co... which seems to impact the setup a bit

Yeah, it's pretty much the dumb AP setup with minimal changes. I'm still on swconfig, I wasn't aware of the switch.

Micro PC with quad-port Intel NIC as virtualized router + UniFi AP, but moving to OpenWRT on APU2 with mPCIe Wi-Fi card.

The latter.

For example, I am using Unifi Wifi devices just for wifi, another box does all the NAT-stuff etc.

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