Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

A definite tangent: About three house moves ago I had OpenWRT on a cable router and knew what was going on. But with family and work and house moves I am now just staring at a flashing BT Home Hub and wondering how to tackle the inevitable "of course that router firmware wont allow that and your ISP wont give out its password and ..."

Is there a uptodate reliable guide (possibly including how to persuade your wife it's a good idea to drill holes in the living room ceiling to run cat6)

View on HN

Same here. And AFAICT those "Hubs" have no bridge mode, so the best you can do is double-NAT yourself. Even if you can replace it with your own device, I've just received a letter informing me that they're migrating our landlines to be VOIP, delivered through the phone socket on the back of the router, so if you want to keep landline service then you may need to keep their hardware too

What I find easy(ier?) is to run (x)sense on a dedicated firewall and either a mesh with cheap openwrt routers or get something like Deco mesh and run it in AP mode if you don’t have cat6 at home. I think this combination can be under 300$ for a 3-pack of mesh Deco x20 + an intel card on a refurb dell optiplex.

IME (x)sense is quite problematic when you start doing anything other than the bare minimum. I spent multiple days trying to figure out why it silently stopped accepting IPv6 delegation, or why does it spike latency for no visible reason under load. The underlying reality is that FreeBSD's network stack is much more conservative and has less resources than Linux's, which shows up in articles like this one [1].

On the same Celeron J4125/i226 box VyOS was absolutely perfect, not a single issue, significantly low (and always low) latency with higher throughput.

On the hardware side, I think the /r/homelab hivemind doesn't get challenged enough. Dell optiplexes cost very similarly to Aliexpress Protectli alternatives (such as [2]), while being larger, having a fan, and being overall more hassle. TP Link/Ubiquiti WiFi APs seem to be overall inferior to Aruba Instant On, which is exactly the same hardware HP sells in their Aruba line, but for the same SOHO price.

[1] https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/opnsense-performance-o...

[2] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004272231167.html

The biggest reason I like xSense is because of unbound and using root dns. OpenWRT supports that, but otherwise I have to setup a local linux instance to serve DNS via unbound. With pfsense and opnsense I find that the dns is a lot more stable than unbound as using a resolver seems to work more reliably than a forwarder like dnsmasq.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com