As I’m in the beginning steps of sorting out my homelab, I’m starting to ask questions I haven’t asked before and come across conundrums I hadn’t considered previously. One of which is how to sort out pi-hole given that my ISP has locked down the router tighter than a tight thing.

As I had been reading about and watching YouTube videos, I had stumbled across Tailscale and the idea of VLANs is a nice one. That coupled with wanting to block ads and a new router seemed to the optimal choice.

Another thing is that I eventually want to get a Reolink POE video doorbell and Reolink E1 outdoor camera for my garden and so I’m trying to think somewhat ahead as the last thing I want is a server rack in my house. Aesthetically speaking.

So I stumbled across all the recommendations for Mikrotik and they’re really reasonably priced, especially compared to the Netgear Nighthawk thing I was looking at for ten times the price.

The Mikrotik HAP AX Lite is reasonably priced, does all the cool new stuff, let’s me set up virtual local area networks, has room for growth and has PoE capabilities. It seems to be the perfect choice. But is it? Because it seems almost too good to be true.

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3 points

pfSense either virtualized or on almost any cheap mini pc with more than one nic

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1 point

But then what do I do about WiFi? Sorry if it’s a stupid question.

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2 points

You can purchase wireless access points for fairly cheap from ubiquiti. Wire it into a switch and once you configure it you’re done. You don’t need the software for it running 24/7 unless you like metrics.

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1 point

Was it Ubiquiti that just had a gate of some sort or another or was that Unifi?

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2 points
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Naw not dumb but thats kinda your call, I just put my old WiFi router in Access Point mode and hooked it up to the machine I’m using and it works great. I’m sure it’s possible to use a pcs internal radio to broadcast but I’ve never researched that myself

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1 point

So here’s a random related question, given that you’re using your old router, does that mean you have nothing connected at 5GHz?

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