Comment by CWuestefeld
3 months ago
Not the poster you're responding to, but...
I'm running OPNSense on a GMKtec G9 (a N150-based NUC with dual 2.5Gbps NICs), and a cheap managed switch. All-in, you can get it today for well under $300. Even that is rather overpowered for running my house.
The toughest component to pin down was a mesh wifi system that supports tagging VLAN segments. That's almost exclusively enterprise territory, so it's hard to find something affordable.
Is there a mesh wifi system that can run open source firmware? I imagine that might be the best bet for VLAN tagging too in the "affordable" sense too.
Not that I'm aware of, and I suspect that the whole idea of mesh radio is necessarily so closely tied to the specific hardware that for this to be practical, there's have to be some canonical physical implementation available for developers to program to.
For what it's worth, what I settled on is EnGenius's FitXpress products. But I'm not necessarily recommending that, I'm a bit ambivalent to it. Within its normal operational envelope it works well, but its range is far lesser than the TP-Link device I replaced, and rebooting one of the WAPs in the mesh takes seemingly forever (like, 10 minutes!).