What's new

Good idea or not ?

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

mikeone

Regular Contributor
Hello amigos,

I am building my new apartment home network and would like some advice, I just ordered a pfsense box from Qotom with an i5 8Gb of ram and 4 Gigabit ethernet.

I ordered the Asus AX11000 but it's awfully buggy, so I am returning it back and think of taking his little brother the RT-AX88U it's has AX support and also 8 Gigabit port to connect all my gears and act as Wireless AP for the rest "Phone Tablets ect".

Is this a good idea ? or should I go for an Ubiquiti AP "AC only at the moment" + Gigabit switch ?

Summary :

first solution :

ISP Modem --> Pfsense router --> Asus RT-AX88U as AP
or
ISP Modem --> Pfsense router --> Ubiquiti AC AP + Gigabit Switch

What do you says guys ?
 
Hello amigos,

I am building my new apartment home network and would like some advice, I just ordered a pfsense box from Qotom with an i5 8Gb of ram and 4 Gigabit ethernet.

I ordered the Asus AX11000 but it's awfully buggy, so I am returning it back and think of taking his little brother the RT-AX88U it's has AX support and also 8 Gigabit port to connect all my gears and act as Wireless AP for the rest "Phone Tablets ect".

Is this a good idea ? or should I go for an Ubiquiti AP "AC only at the moment" + Gigabit switch ?

Summary :

first solution :

ISP Modem --> Pfsense router --> Asus RT-AX88U as AP
or
ISP Modem --> Pfsense router --> Ubiquiti AC AP + Gigabit Switch

What do you says guys ?
How many people would have real world experience with these scenarios to offer informed opinions?
  • The simple solution is just to have the RT-AX88U as a router but you must like pfSense
  • RT-AX88U in AP mode: can the ports be used like a switch without complications?
  • Alternate firmwares (Merlin, Voxel) are not usually developed with AP and bridge mode testing
  • I would guess the WiFi performance of the RT-AX88U to be superior to Ubiquiti, but only published test results are preliminary for AX88U and none for Ubiquiti
  • Lot of opinionated fanboys for each vendor so good advice might not be available
 
I dont really like or dislike Pfsense I just want to experience how its works, never had it installed and after reading a lot it appear to be rock solid stable and packed with a lot of features.
If I buy the RT-AX88U that will be on Merlin firmware for sure but as an AP, just need to be sure the connected devices through Ethernet will work flawlessly.
The Wifi performance should be better with the Asus for next generation client "AX" for the AC clients it's should be the same or a little better on Ubiquiti.
Certainly not an easy choice that why I created that post though
 
Although DFS channels have been reported as problematic, I consider it a must have feature for an apartment setting. All regular 5 GHz channels here are congested but I have DFS to myself.
 
I dont really like or dislike Pfsense I just want to experience how its works, never had it installed and after reading a lot it appear to be rock solid stable and packed with a lot of features.
If I buy the RT-AX88U that will be on Merlin firmware for sure but as an AP, just need to be sure the connected devices through Ethernet will work flawlessly.
The Wifi performance should be better with the Asus for next generation client "AX" for the AC clients it's should be the same or a little better on Ubiquiti.
Certainly not an easy choice that why I created that post though

I too got the itch to see pfSense for myself not that long ago. Search for my previous posts if you're interested.

In summary, I built an i5 6400 16GB RAM with 2x Intel NIC's and had a very unsatisfactory experience (the Gbps up/down ISP provided speeds would steadily decrease over time, and the responsiveness of the network as a whole was below my RT-AC3100 running RMerlin 384.10_x at the time.

I found it effectively impossible to quickly configure and change/test settings. I must have re-installed it over 100 times (with a USB drive, at least that was only a 5-minute process) in a very short time frame. When I finally left everything at defaults and tried using the RT-AC3100 as an AP, that is when I saw the responsiveness/performance fading with each passing day.

Not a positive experience and others here pointed out that a basic understanding of Networking is required, but my take is if it is left at defaults and the experience is worse than any router I've used, that is just bad design.

Note that although the experience was worse for me, when the install was 'fresh' (btw, rebooting the pfSense box didn't help), it was noticeably faster than the RT-AC3100 running 384.10_2 by that time. Too bad it couldn't stay that way. ;)

The RT-AC86U with RMerlin 384.11_0 release running DoT plus these scripts including; amtm, Diversion,
+ Entware + pixelserv-tls, Skynet, YazFi, ntpMerlin, connmon, scMerlin, and uiDivStats all running from a 256GB USB 3.0 drive in USB 2.0 mode with a 2GB swap file on an Ext4, labeled partition, and with journaling enabled is a much more stable, much more feature-rich and much more secure and reliable platform for my network than pfSense every allowed me to experience. And I want to say just a fast and responsive too, in everyday use (and not just maximum possible speedtest scores).

I will be happy to hear your experience with pfSense, hope it was better than mine. :)
 
Thanks you for your explanation about your experience.
I still have never experienced with pfsense still waiting my Qotom box to arrive before doing the setup of everything I will for sure make some performance test and compare, then post my result here
from what I have read there is quiet a difference in performance ans stability since this is actually a semi pro hardware-software router config.
Well I think i'll go through the route of the RT-AX88 in case pfsense is not what I imagined I can switch the Asus from AP to Router.
 
Last edited:
I ran Cisco WAP371 wireless APs using pfsense for about a year with no issues. It seems to me if you are going to run pfsense you only need wireless APs, why buy a router?

Buy wireless APs and pfsense you should be able to run 2 SSIDs so you can have a guest network which you can share printers and stuff on and still block guess access to the real LAN. That will not be the case with consumer routers or ASUS any way.
 
I ran Cisco WAP371 wireless APs using pfsense for about a year with no issues. It seems to me if you are going to run pfsense you only need wireless APs, why buy a router?

Buy wireless APs and pfsense you should be able to run 2 SSIDs so you can have a guest network which you can share printers and stuff on and still block guess access to the real LAN. That will not be the case with consumer routers or ASUS any way.


Asus routers also block guest access to the LAN and it can share other resources too for the main network. ;)
 
@mikeone - The great part about deciding to run your "core" off of an x86 Intel box is that you're not bound to sticking with pfSense, whether @L&LD 's experience holds true, or otherwise. You can just as easily (often more easily) run the likes of OPNSense, OpenWRT, Untangle Home, Sophos UTM Community, IPFire, a vanilla distro custom-built as your gateway, etc. etc. etc. -- whatever gets you the end result you're after. And between all of those, you'll be able to find something, I'm sure.

As far as wireless goes, I don't know how much interest you have in needing to feel like you're on the bleeding edge, or patience you have with tinkering, flakiness, etc., but I would leave AX alone, at least until well after they ratify the first draft (later this year, if we're lucky), and instead deploy solid, proven AC Wave 2 for the time being. Instead of dropping $300-400+ on a consumer beta-ware AIO, I'd save some coin and scale back to an AC version running a proven-stable release of OpenWRT or DD-WRT. Or, for similar money but biz-grade on the cheap, UniFi. Or, if you don't mind parting with the cash and want something rock-solid and/or real mesh with things like 802.11k/r/v that actually work, full-blown enterprise wifi. Aruba AP3__ , Ruckus R7__ , whatever. I also get that enterprise stuff is likely overkill, considering your goals, skills, budget (or all three) but nevertheless, I couldn't leave that $400 untouched without mentioning more worthwhile options, at least IMHO. :)
 
Last edited:
@Trip I just received yesterday my Qotom box installed 8GB ram and an mSata ssd of 120go fired a bootable usb and installed Pfsense 2.4.4
Install done interface WAN & LAN configured, switch the ISP modem to Bridge everything seem to work fine at the moment, but god there is so much things to learn, tweak and that apart for packages.
my Current setup : ISP Modem --> PFsense Router --> Asus AX11000 in AP Mode (will be replaced by the RT-AX88U with Merlin firmware.
Why the Asus, It's has 8 Gigabit port that is exactly what I need to connect my gears and the rest will be connected via the Wireless and since it has WIFI6 (ax) it's future proof and will not require me to change this setup in a long time.
Now I need to learn what are the best config possible for my devices, what package I can install that bring very useful features. ex Squid, PFsenseBlocker, ect ...
If someone can help or point out to a good website to learn and tweak my setup that will be great.
Thank you all
 
Asus routers also block guest access to the LAN and it can share other resources too for the main network. ;)

So you can share guest across multiple ASUS wireless routers using the second router as a wireless extension? Do you share printers with your guest?
 
So you can share guest across multiple ASUS wireless routers using the second router as a wireless extension? Do you share printers with your guest?

No, to both.
 
Hehe...

pfSense is a journey, and it rewards those that understand networking basics.
 

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top