Need some direction on hardware for home network

Most electricians can do the cable pulls but do the terminations yourself. They will charge just as much as a cable guy but it will be somewhat less painful than diy.

Have you tried looking for an official openwrt build for your Airport AP’s? Flashing that would give them full VLAN and multiple SSID capability. Everything a unifi switch can do plus more.

I’m running 1 tplink tl-wr940nv6 as an access point and another tplink tl-wr841nv9 as a repeater for both of my wireless networks. The DMZ vlan starts on an extra gigabit nic coming out of the pfsense box, and going to a second port on the tplink router, that is tagged for that vlan, effectively using the tplink router as an advanced switch and wireless AP.

I paid no more than $40 for both tplink routers. You can repurpose just about anything with the right software. Openwrt IMHO is a more professional piece of software than what the unifi AP’s run.

I havent tried OpenWRT in a few years, however I wasn’t a big fan of it then. Didn’t seem to integrate too well with the rest of the components.

Well that sure was a while ago. It’s got a stable release tree now, I haven’t had one single problem since 2016 and my system is very responsive and stable. Pfsense compatibility is as easy as going in startup settings, disabling firewall, odhpd, and dnsmasq. It’s worth a try, especially if you can reuse hardware you already have. Earth friendly and all that.

You also get the latest Linux kernel and security that comes along with it.

The main problem with openwrt is some restrictions on hardware due to licensing/driver/doc availability for certain chipsets. Sadly, I cannot use that with my ASUS wifi routers.
One thing worth noting - your TL-WR940v6 will be unsupported by any new version of openwrt in 2020 due to RAM size.

My wr841nv9 (older than 940nv6 and same amount of ram) has been unsupported multiple times throughout the last few years for that suppossed reason, yet I’ve always found a barebones community documented build of either openwrt or lede. Since I only use these routers as a wireless AP and repeater the ram is never a limitation. However I wouldn’t recommend someone go out and buy my setup lol. I’m using what I already have until it no longer meets my needs.

Openwrt’s restrictions on hardware are only for those few routers out there running proprietary chipsets. The drivers have no documentation. Openwrt wouldn’t be able to implement those routers reliably without breaking their own guidelines of software integrity. They actually do offer builds for most of those routers (mediatek chipset comes to mind)the difference is they’re compiled without the proprietary driver, leaving you with just a switch and no WiFi functionality. Most proprietary drivers are built on older Linux kernels and are rarely updated to run with newer ones. Openwrt would have to roll back from the latest kernel just to support these proprietary drivers, which they aren’t willing to do.

However, there is a solution to almost every problem. DD-WRT is more friendly to proprietary code. I’ll bet there is an unofficial, documented DD-WRT build out for your router right now. I recently liberated an Asus router with the mediatek proprietary chipset using a community DD-WRT build. Full wifi functionality, 100% reliable and haven’t had to restart it once. Running for 5months now. The builds are pretested by the dev before release.

DDWRT’s gui is a little rough around the edges but you can do almost anything openwrt can.

@TheAlmightyOrgreLord

I don’t doubt you’ve have good results with either OpenWRT or DDWRT, however consider your audience here in the forum. Tom seems to have organized this forum to be directed towards more business or professional solutions. In my opinion DD-WRT/OpenWRT is more slanted towards the home user or more specifically the home hobbyist. I have no doubt some SMB may utilize this technology, however I don’t think deploying and managing anything at a large scale would make utilize Openwrt – Way too much tinkering.

@kevdog I understand where you’re coming from, however I don’t see how software that brings corporate-level router features to consumer routers can be considered only for hobbyists.

Most businesses looking to increase their profit margin would appreciate the ability to get the job done with what they already have. That’s exactly the goal of OpenWRT, and especially DD-WRT. OpenWRT was made because of the demand for more integrity with open source software. Running the latest Linux kernel and benefitting from the latest wpa2 security protocol is far from unprofessional.

Sorry but I disagree: