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New Wi-Fi router with focus on LAN and networking

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Rasbelin

Occasional Visitor
I've bricked one Asus RT-AC66U with DD-WRT going bonkers and made a bad purchase by buying a TP-Link Archer C7, which otherwise is excellent, except there's one big issue... No fricking jumbo frame support!

So I'm once again looking for a new cornerstone for my pretty complex LAN and WLAN setup. I have another AP (dual band b/g/n) at the other side of my appartment, but it's pretty irrelevant. Guest networking is done by a dedicated specialised AP (Intellinet GuestGate MK II).

What I have no need for...

- BitTorrent and other kiddie stuff.
- USB for printers and storage. I have a Xeon server with RAID 5 on-site for storage. Printing is done with a LAN printer.
- Fancy mydlink or similar management crap.

I can accept those in a product, but they shouldn't stop me from doing what I need to accomplish.

What I do need...

- WPA2 Enterprise (RADIUS) support.
- Proper routing performance.
- Gigabit WAN and Ethernet.
- Dual band Wi-Fi.
- Jumbo frames.
- IPv6.
- Manual NTP configuration.
- Proper daylight saving (i.e. last Sunday in March and October).

Way too many manuals don't tell you how DST is supported, not to mention if jumbo frames can be enabled for LAN.

Or maybe I should have an Ethernet router (like TP-Link or Cisco) and a second AP? I just don't want more device clutter as WAN is already by a separate ZyXEL VDSL2 modem and later on FTTH will be by a dedicated GPON CPE.
 
Just a quick follow-up... As far as I've gathered details, these are a no-no:

TP-Link - no jumbo frames
D-Link DIR-868L and DIR-880L - no RADIUS
Linksys EA6900 - no details about jumbo frames
Netgear R7000 - no jumbo frames?

Any corrections are welcome. :)
 
You can always try mikrotik although it is not easy to configure. It has a RADIUS server, NTP server and client, jumbo frames and if you get their models that have PPC or TILE you can get gigabit software routing performance (meaning you can have firewall and QoS at gigabit NAT speeds). I suggest choosing depending on your uses and needs.

RB850gx2 - dual core PPC at 500mhz, may do gigabit NAT but not the fastest
RB1100AHx2 - dual core PPC at 1Ghz, does gigabit NAT
CCR1009 (fanless) does multi gigabit NAT with multiple simple firewall and QoS rules.
(performance listed on website is for layer 3 routing, not NAT. NAT involves firewall rules and the performances differ by how many linked rules you have in total).
All of them support jumbo frames but the CCR supports the largest frame when not using switch chip which is above 10K whereas the software within the CCR supports packets up to 65535 bytes. The only thing none of these have is wifi which you can just get from using another access point(or by adding usb wifi card). In order to use WPA-2 enterprise you need a RADIUS server.

it would help if you mentioned your internet download and upload speeds although the CCR will not only max out gigabit speed internet but also for VPN but only if you have at least 4 links (per connection restrictions).

Ofcourse cisco (the expensive ones, not cisco-RVs) and junipers are a good choice too but you will need to check the performance too. All of these are not consumer routers and require a great deal of skill to configure.
 
Currently VDSL2 is at 100/10 Mbps and FTTH will start at 100/50 Mbps, but it can scale up to 1000/100 Mbps. Probably going to be doing 250/50 Mbps. Most of the heavy traffic will always be inside the LAN as 95% of all data is centralised on the file server. The number of users is very low, but the performance especially with the Asus was crap and TP-Link isn't doing so well either.

There's a secondary LAN for the heavy duty traffic that's not routed at all. One workstation, one HTPC and one server on an umanaged switch. I actually forgot to mention it.

RADIUS is run by the server.
 
A typical home rack that you can find in every well equipped Finnish home... or not. ;)

home rack.jpg

The NAS server in the rack is awaiting retirement and will be replaced with a proper Windows server that's currently in a pre-production phase.
 
Ofcourse cisco (the expensive ones, not cisco-RVs) and junipers are a good choice too but you will need to check the performance too. All of these are not consumer routers and require a great deal of skill to configure.

Costwise a Cisco RV320 might be acceptable, but again no reference to jumbo frames in the admin manual. Then I would just have to choose one more AP to cover my home, if it would've been an option.

I wouldn't want a device that requires too much continuous tinkering. That's why I've mainly looked at prosumer grade stuff, but it seems to me they're still too focused on folksy family all-around use.
 
you could always run consumer hardware with openwrt but you will need a dual core ARM router for your speeds. Its still better to use mikrotik though but they require the same amount of skill to configure as with openwrt, ubiquiti and cisco IOS.

If you need a core router for LAN only stuff than the CCR is quite capable as CPU bridging has more features than switching and the CCR and do wirespeed L2 and L3. in terms of ethernet the CCR supports >10K frames but if you use virtual interfaces, tunnels, etc than you can use frames at 65K in size. The other choice would be a managed switch for your LAN.

I have my own rack in my room that has 6 GPGPU servers, a managed switch and a mikrotik CCR1036 and another server for pfsense and the like.
 
What have you found the performance gain to be using Jumbo frames? With today's system designs and OSes, they shouldn't make much if any difference.

I took jumbo frame tests out of the NAS benchmarks years ago, when I found they reduced performance. Many NASes now basically saturate a gigabit link without jumbo frames.
 
What have you found the performance gain to be using Jumbo frames? With today's system designs and OSes, they shouldn't make much if any difference.

I took jumbo frame tests out of the NAS benchmarks years ago, when I found they reduced performance. Many NASes now basically saturate a gigabit link without jumbo frames.

he has a point there. When using jumbo frames and the networking hardware has to break up packets it reduces performance since wifi uses above 2K frames while internet uses 1500 and below. So unless every piece of equipment you have supports the same packet size you'll see decreases in performances for devices that cannot keep up (such as some switches or routers). The CCR obviously has no issues keeping up when just using the CPU but i doubt every other device on the network is capable of the same thing.

Unless you're using pentiums and athlons theres just no need to use jumbo frames because computer systems and networking gear are fast enough to deal with more packets that the standard 1500 bytes work better. I use it because i have really fast networking equipment so i dont have issues when it has to do conversions. NICs like intel and marvel also have their own processors that can keep up too which reduces CPU usage when the system is used solely for routing such as with pfsense.

you might want to have an open mind here because many here have more knowledge, skill and hardware than you do so you technically cant show off (check the other networking forum for "post pictures of your network setup" thread).
 
you could always run consumer hardware with openwrt but you will need a dual core ARM router for your speeds. Its still better to use mikrotik though but they require the same amount of skill to configure as with openwrt, ubiquiti and cisco IOS.

Well, I'm new to full scale router OSs, but willing to learn. However I do appreciate a graphical GUI to grasp stuff fast. That's why I've always liked more working with Windows than *NIX. I haven't so far found any manual for Mikrotik, so no idea how the configuration works.

Would your suggestion be to have a dedicated Ethernet router, Cisco or Mikrotik, and add one AP?

My current switches are a D-Link DGS-1210-24 for the primary LAN and a small Netgear ProSAFE GS105Ev2 for the file transfer LAN.

I've been planning to use 9K frames as that's what's all the equipment, except the ZyXEL VDSL2 modem, support. Well, the GuestGate MK II doesn't support any jumbo frames either, but then again it's only doing Internet for guests, plus the second AP, D-Link DAP-2690, doesn't of course either have it supported.
 
On a second note... I have previously run 9K jumbo frames on the primary LAN with some devices (mainly my main Sony smart TV) not supporting those and I haven't noticed any trouble with them. I've been lucky or I just haven't noticed the issues? Inevitably any new LAN router with jumbo frames would still mean that some of the network would be using normal sized frames. At least two TVs, a few game consoles, one AV receiver etc.

So am I after all better off without any jumbo frames like Tim suggested?
 
mikrotik has a GUI but its manual is a wiki with weird online examples that usually correspond more with business and different networks that you dont find at home. Also not all routerboards support jumbo frames, but the CCRs supports any size frame up to 10K frames on ports connected to CPU and up to 65K frames from L3 and higher. It is crucial that you make sure all your data frames are the same size (some devices show inclusive of header while some dont). Frames between devices dont have to be the same size but their data sizes must be the same for the most efficient configuration since headers can have different sizes.

The only inefficiency with routerOS is that you must use ports directly connected to the CPU to get more NAT performance. If you connected your LAN and WAN to 2 ports connected to the CPU than you will see a huge NAT performance but if 1 or both used a port connected to the switch chip the performance will decrease or just use more CPU cycles. Every connection in routerOS is restricted to a maximum of 1 core so it affects per client traffic and other things like per client VPN throughput but each CCR CPU core is fast enough to perform gigabit routing throughputs or 300Mb/s of PPTP VPN. They're way better than cisco RVs since the cisco RVs have the same quality and unreliability as consumer routers and are fitted with MIPS based CPUs that do not do well if you have many rules, configs and tunnels/VPNs.
 
Currently my WAN is on one port and LAN is one port, from where there's a CAT6 STP cable to a port on the primary LAN switch. It looks darn costly to buy a router with over 20 ports, so not an option really. Would I still be better off with Mikrotik, even if WAN is on one port and LAN is on one port? Should I maybe switch all three connections from the file transfer LAN to three ports on the Mikrotik?
 
if you go with the cheapest CCR (though noisy) which doesnt have SFP+ you will still benefit using it as a router fully and if you want you can switch all 3 LAN connections to mikrotik. On the CCR1009, half ports are switched and the rest arent (there is a diagram on which ports are switched and which arent). Because the CPU is very fast it can handle both the layer 2/layer 3 at wirespeed and gigabit speed NAT using the CPU only. The only inefficient thing about routerboards is that their switch chip connects to the CPU at 1Gb/s (like on any other router with a switch chip) which limits throughput between switch and CPU to 2Gb/s.

The mikrotik CCR is meant to be a router that handles the core of your network so you can even run your network using layer 3 if you like and it will route at wirespeed. If you use jumbo frames at 9K it gives you 5 times more LAN throughput which lets you burden it with more rules for LAN. By using it as a core router/switch you can utilise filtering since CPU bridging for layer 2 is capable or utilising layer 3 features or IP features. Since it uses 20W or less you can switch some of your server functions to it such as RADIUS server and save power by allowing your servers to sleep. RouterOS has wake on LAN and can be scripted to wake your server when it is needed though this is complicated to set up that im still working on it. The RADIUS server on routerOS can be used for various things including wired LAN. The mikrotik CCR1036 has a massive amount of throughput comparable to the cisco edge routers but use a lot less watts in the process but they do not do cisco features well.

You can try a demo of routerOS at demo.mt.lv but i dont think it shows what it can do with bridging. Routers with a switch chip has a switch section that lets you configure the switch.

If you have a budget of near $1000 the other alternative to a mikrotik CCR is a cisco router with IOS. I've seen some that have wifi too although they do not have as much throughput as the mikrotik CCR though it depends on your internet and how you utilise them because the throughputs decrease on routerOS and cisco IOS as you add more rules and configs but they let you do all sorts of stuff.
 
Based on your original list of three options you suggest, the MikroTik RouterBOARD RB1100AHx2 looks now most promising to me in terms of price and features. I assume it too can handle my two LANs without problems? However I might still go with the MikroTik Cloud Core Router CCR1009-8G-1S as it's the cheapest.

Basically I just need 4 LAN ports to be switching and other than that it's just routing between the WAN (Internet) and LAN switch (D-Link).

Yeah, could possibly consider running RADIUS with the router, rather than with the server.

Actually I yesterday started thinking that it might just as well be useful to drop my other AP and buy two new APs instead with new 802.11ac equipment. However I don't intend to pay a few hundred bucks per AP. Might as well buy two consumer routers with AP mode. Then again Edimax doesn't look too bad. This all now depends really on can I get the cabling done to the ceiling for a ceiling mounted AP.
 
Im not so sure of the jumbo frames of the RB1100AHx2 but i know for a fact that the CCR supports 10K frames on ethernet ports directly connected to the CPU. The CCR1009 will be able to bridge LAN and perform WAN at the same time at wirespeed but i dont know the jumbo frames capability of the switch chip in the CCR. Im using the CCR1036 that doesnt have a switch chip. The RB1100AHx2 has some ports that are switched too but has less CPU power in total compared to the CCR despite each PPC core being faster than a TILE core. Its basically a choice between 9 TILE cores or 2 PPC cores and both are general purpose CPUs though the TILE is a specialised general purpose CPU with a focus on performing logical tasks rather than math but both hardware have accelerators for encryption and floats. There may be a datasheet somewhere that shows the maximum size frames supported by various parts of the platforms but the OS will be the same. The RB1100AHx2 caps out at 2Gb/s of NAT but has no issues performing bridging either but i am not sure how whether it can perform 8Gb/s of bridging.

as for APs unless you want to wait for some good MU-MIMO you can go with inexpensive ones like the asus AC56U, ruckus, and such. Many people tend to make the mistake of buying the wrong APs for indoor use such as ubiquiti APs which are made to use outdoor and have limited hardware resources. I know mikrotik has indoor APs (RB9xx) that cost around $80 with wireless AC but i dont know if they're dual band though if you just want to expand on 5 Ghz they are a good bargain considering the amount of hardware resource they have as an AP and expansion options(miniPCIe, USB, POE in, SFP). Do note that some routerboards are sold as complete units with case and PSU while some are just sold as the board itself.

Its important to remember that the TILE CPU uses a mesh bus which is both advantageous and disadvantageous at the same time so it has a lot of total bandwidth(kinda like a GPU) which does very well with multiple tasks but not on crushing serial workloads. There is a simple pdf article from mikrotik explaining how to optimise your config for the CCR but even with your use and configs of all traffic using the CPU i dont think you're going to max out the CPU.


Make sure to always update your routerboard with latest stable firmware and not the release candidates or betas despite the tempting new features.
 
My Wi-Fi is primarily intended for 5 GHz as I have the only network in that spectrum here. 2,4 GHz is starting to get crowded, except for some reason nobody is on channel 12 and I can keep 13 to myself. But then again not all devices have 12-13, even when it's the EU. Also you get better performance with 5 GHz. On a sidenote my guest Wi-Fi is on channel 5, with some distant network on channel 6 and 4 being free, while 3 is occupied. Not all devices support 5 GHz, so I need to have the primary Wi-Fi also broadcasted on 2,4 GHz.

Ruckus would be great in a commercial environment, but it's way too expensive for my home. I already promised my Archer C7 to a neighbour, so I can't buy a second one of those. :)

Will have to ponder overnight which MikroTik I'll order.
 
You can add wifi to mikrotik CCR by using a usb wifi. I think the most you can use is dual stream AC wifi because it uses usb2. You can also add a usb hard drive to it but it only supports FAT32. The usb wifi compatibility list for mikrotik is quite short. Dual stream wireless AC will work fine on usb2 because the practical bandwidth for wifi is 60% rated bandwidth.
 
Any other suggestions for two APs (native or router in AP mode) besides Asus AC-56U, which I'm a bit weary about after that bricked Dark Knight? Also it can't be wall mounted. Now RADIUS really is the only peculiarity needed, plus access to NTP settings. Dualband and good coverage are of course taken for granted.

@thiggins: Any suggestions by the great Wi-Fi wizard? :)
 

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