Help bring sanity to my home setup :)

[itpromike]

So while I'm doing some work for others on my other post, I think it's time to spruce up my own home setup as well. Currently I have:

Office - Comcast Xfinity and using a N66U with a tower computer & networked printer connected to the N66
Living Room - Ubiquity Touchswitch POE connected with CAT5e to the N66U and a Mac Mini, Synology NAS, PS4, and WiiU hardwire to the Toughswitch

Lately I haven't been happy with the range or the stability of the router as well as the LAN throughput could use some work but I'm guessing this is because it's doing dual duty as an AP and router/switch...?

So what I'm thinking is I'd replace the N66 with an R7000 (using Merlin or Tomato FW?) Use it as just an AP. I would then connect another switch in my office maybe this Linksys one or this Netgear one directly to my Comcast router (to use it for what it was intended for and just serve up DHCP etc...) and then connect the living room toughswitch to the new Linksys/Netgear switch- this way I would keep all local LAN traffic contained within the 2 switches (thus keeping all LAN overhead off the router and AP) to get the best LAN performance and using the R7000 to get the best wireless performance.

Does this sound like a good plan? Is there anything that doesn't make sense, wouldn't work, or should be changed? Also there shouldn't be a problem running a switch directly from another switch as long as somewhere in the upline there's a DHCP server (my cable router in this scenario) right?

Thanks for any guidance you can give with this!

 

[htismaqe]

Looks fine to me.

 

[CaptainSTX]

Before replacing or adding any equipment I would try relocating the N66 to another and perhaps more central location in your home.

Also you can not connect a switch to a modem unless is also a router which you then can use for DHCP functionality.

A diagram of your system as well as the floor plan of your home should help someone give you additional advice.

In general you are on the right track in that wired connections are always preferable to WiFi.

 

[itpromike]

Before replacing or adding any equipment I would try relocating the N66 to another and perhaps more central location in your home.

Also you can not connect a switch to a modem unless is also a router which you then can use for DHCP functionality.

A diagram of your system as well as the floor plan of your home should help someone give you additional advice.

In general you are on the right track in that wired connections are always preferable to WiFi.

Thanks, the cable modem is one of those WiFi, modem, router all in one deals so it can serve up DHCP. Also I forgot to mention I have several AC capable clients in the house so this move would to R7000 would also serve the purpose of providing AC in the house where as the N66U is just N. Thanks for the help!

 

[System Error Message]

you can connect a switch to modem and than the router to switch but the ports must be isolated from the rest of the network. If you are in a crowded 2.4 Ghz area than you may want to disable the 2.4Ghz radio of the R7000 and use your n66u for the job.

In general its best to connect the modem to the router and than to switches. routers have switch chips so their wired performance shouldnt be slow unless the firmware isnt done right or configuration but the bridging performance of wireless to wire and vice versa on most routers uses the CPU.

Try to set up a star based network topology connecting your 2 switches an AP to the R7000 or you can dedicate a switch as a central switch instead incase router goes down.

 

[itpromike]

you can connect a switch to modem and than the router to switch but the ports must be isolated from the rest of the network. If you are in a crowded 2.4 Ghz area than you may want to disable the 2.4Ghz radio of the R7000 and use your n66u for the job.

In general its best to connect the modem to the router and than to switches. routers have switch chips so their wired performance shouldnt be slow unless the firmware isnt done right or configuration but the bridging performance of wireless to wire and vice versa on most routers uses the CPU.

Try to set up a star based network topology connecting your 2 switches an AP to the R7000 or you can dedicate a switch as a central switch instead incase router goes down.

The router and cable modem are all-in-one so I was going to connect the switch to the router/modem and connect the second switch to the first switch - then use R7000 for Wireless only. Why did you suggest to use the N66u for 2.4? Would it make the R7000 operate that much faster or better if it just handled 5HZ and 2.4 was handled by the N66U since the 2.4 and 5GHZ would then be dedicated to their own device?

 

[Trip]

Re- the AP/router being on one box, I'd set the N66U to AP duty and add a dedicated router. If you're at or less than, say, 200 Mb/s WAN and don't need CPU-intensive stuff on the router itself (VPN, torrenting, complex firewalling, etc.), then single-core MIPS should be more than enough -- a $40 WNR3500Lv2 + Tomato is one I've used for 20+ residential installs and never a single phone call in 2+ years... If you're on higher speed Comcast, then dual-core ARM like an R7000 + XVortex/Merlin or Tomato should allow for 500+ Mb/s. If you want to do VPN or CPU-heavy stuff and max out your WAN speeds, then you're looking at more money for PPC or x86-based options, and we can go there with suggestions if you indicate as such.

On the Comcast unit, I know you'd lose some device support (not that their support is that good) but whenever possible, I usually try and bridge the ISP units and use them as connection negotiators only, passing the routing, dhcp, firewalling duties to my gear. I bet you know this, but I just figured I'd mention it. Either that, or request that they swap the unit with a plain and simple modem altogether. If you've never tried either before, you'd be surprised how much WAN-LAN performance can improve across the board.

For maintaining consistent quality throughput inside your LAN, you want to run everything in a star-layout through a quality gigabit switch of appropriate capacity and management level. The 8-port unmanaged models you were looking at are decent. You might want to consider a 16-port for future space and/or managed or at least "smart" switches if you're heading down the road of multiple switching paths, where things like spanning tree may come into play.

Hope some of that helps.

 

[System Error Message]

Forgot to mention, use your modem combo as a modem only and use what you were going to buy as the router. This is because many routers given by ISPs are usually bad at things and are only alright if you are the only user and are a light user.

If you were going to buy the R7000 use it as a router because it has many more features and you would expect to see better things and perhaps faster internet? Also some of these routers have built in anti virus and other features that can come in handy.

I know one ISP that gives out dlink-dir615s which locks up once in a while, are less responsive and have a vulnerability that is never fixed since you can just get the router login and PPP account details just by requesting a particular file at the link. Worse still is that these routers are configured by default to be accesseable from WAN just because the ISP wants to reduce the workload for tech support relating to solving the unskilled customer problem. This is why you should never use the router given by the ISP if you want a decent network. There are some ISPs that are an exception to this but only very few.

 

[ulaganath]

Quite interesting things in this discussion. As he rightly pointed out ac clients are capable of draining more from router. As your setup also has NAS it would be better to setup ac and n clients apart. This doesn't meant r7000 can't handle. It's one of the best top ac router for wireless range and stable upto 40+ days.

Keep a thought on star topology. It would be good

Sent from my ASUS_Z00AD using Tapatalk

 

[itpromike]

Re- the AP/router being on one box, I'd set the N66U to AP duty and add a dedicated router. If you're at or less than, say, 200 Mb/s WAN and don't need CPU-intensive stuff on the router itself (VPN, torrenting, complex firewalling, etc.), then single-core MIPS should be more than enough -- a $40 WNR3500Lv2 + Tomato is one I've used for 20+ residential installs and never a single phone call in 2+ years... If you're on higher speed Comcast, then dual-core ARM like an R7000 + XVortex/Merlin or Tomato should allow for 500+ Mb/s. If you want to do VPN or CPU-heavy stuff and max out your WAN speeds, then you're looking at more money for PPC or x86-based options, and we can go there with suggestions if you indicate as such.

On the Comcast unit, I know you'd lose some device support (not that their support is that good) but whenever possible, I usually try and bridge the ISP units and use them as connection negotiators only, passing the routing, dhcp, firewalling duties to my gear. I bet you know this, but I just figured I'd mention it. Either that, or request that they swap the unit with a plain and simple modem altogether. If you've never tried either before, you'd be surprised how much WAN-LAN performance can improve across the board.

For maintaining consistent quality throughput inside your LAN, you want to run everything in a star-layout through a quality gigabit switch of appropriate capacity and management level. The 8-port unmanaged models you were looking at are decent. You might want to consider a 16-port for future space and/or managed or at least "smart" switches if you're heading down the road of multiple switching paths, where things like spanning tree may come into play.

Hope some of that helps.

Wowsers, that definitely helps but some is a bit above my head - multiple switching paths, spanning tree, start topology even Currently the cable modem/router all-in-one is set to bridge mode and the N66U is the router it's bridged to with all other devices hanging off the N66U. Since my environment is very data hungry (torrents running all the time, gaming, streaming 1080P and 4K content from my local 12TB media NAS etc...) one of the prevailing notions was to separate the Wireless functions from the hardwired traffic by have an AP do wireless and local traffic on dedicated switches.

That being said if I were to leave my modem in bridged mode, connect it to the R7000, use the R7000 for 5GHz and AC, then Connect the N66U to use for 2.4, then connect the primary switch in my office to it and connect the secondary switch in my living room to the primary switch - would this put too much strain on the R7000 thus leaving me in the same boat where it's serving up LAN traffic and Wireless and because of the huge CPU overhead of all that LAN traffic be prone to performance issues and stability problems?

OR since the 2 switches are directly connecting to each other, all the LAN traffic would stay on those and only cross into the R7000 for internet when needed so it should be able to handle serving internet traffic to the switch connected devices and serve up 5GHZ AC traffic as well?

I hope this makes sense?

 

[System Error Message]

LAN traffic on a router doesnt use up the CPU. Almost all routers have a switch chip that handles LAN traffic so routers can also become a switch. For example your n66u not only can handle wireless but will handle wired LAN with no effort because it would use the switch chip.

Ofcourse using a central switch is better since if the router goes down the network stays up but it is more efficient to use the r7000 as the central switch (in terms of watts, number of devices, etc). So you have the choice between redundancy and possibly management (if you use managed switch), possible network efficiency vs power efficiency

 

[htismaqe]

That being said if I were to leave my modem in bridged mode, connect it to the R7000, use the R7000 for 5GHz and AC, then Connect the N66U to use for 2.4, then connect the primary switch in my office to it and connect the secondary switch in my living room to the primary switch - would this put too much strain on the R7000 thus leaving me in the same boat where it's serving up LAN traffic and Wireless and because of the huge CPU overhead of all that LAN traffic be prone to performance issues and stability problems?

You won't have any trouble doing it like this. The R7000 can handle it, layer 2 switching isn't particularly CPU intensive anyway.

 

[itpromike]

LAN traffic on a router doesnt use up the CPU. Almost all routers have a switch chip that handles LAN traffic so routers can also become a switch. For example your n66u not only can handle wireless but will handle wired LAN with no effort because it would use the switch chip.

Ofcourse using a central switch is better since if the router goes down the network stays up but it is more efficient to use the r7000 as the central switch (in terms of watts, number of devices, etc). So you have the choice between redundancy and possibly management (if you use managed switch), possible network efficiency vs power efficiency

You won't have any trouble doing it like this. The R7000 can handle it, layer 2 switching isn't particularly CPU intensive anyway.

So large torrent traffic wouldn't consume a lot of CPU either?

 

[Hawk]

So large torrent traffic wouldn't consume a lot of CPU either?

Nope, I have Rt-ac68u I rarely seen cpu doing much. R7000 has similar hardware at least cpu, should not have problem.

 

[System Error Message]

large torrent traffic involves many connections which relates to memory. Some routers are good at memory while some are bad at it and will freeze with too many connections.

 

[itpromike]

Ok so the R7000 should be here today, I'm excited! I know I know, being excited about a new router is kinda nerdy but I'm a tech guy I love new things to configure LOL. Several of you have mentioned I should do a star topology with the R7000 at the center of the star but I have a question about that. If the R7000 is the center of the star then it will be routing all the traffic etc... so is there really any reason to add the 2nd switch at this point? I might as well plug everything in my office directly to the R7000 and have the stuff in my living room chained of it over the switch that's in there now - essentially the same setup I had before except I'm switching out the N66u for the R7000. Am I missing something? Is there a difference between having 2 switches coming off the R7000 containing clients on those switches and no clients directly on the R7000 or have only 1 switch full of clients and the other clients directly connected to the R7000?

 

[htismaqe]

There's really no difference. Add switches as you need the ports.

 

[itpromike]

There's really no difference. Add switches as you need the ports.

Thanks for all the advice. Thanks everyone for all the advise in this thread, it's been immensely helpful. Now my last decisions is Merlin FW vs. Tomato... hmm....

 

[Trip]

Congrats on the order, mike. I know that @microchip has had nice uptime with xVortex's port of Merlin on his R7000. Perhaps start there?

 

[itpromike]

Alright guys, so I got my R7000 and after a bit of trial and error I got the Vortex Merlin FW loaded and configured. Results? Well my Comcast package is 150Mbps down and on speediest.net I'm getting 167Mbps... so yeah NICE. Also over wireless I'm getting pretty much 150Mbps so this is working very well so far. I have the N66U being the dedicated 2.4ghz AP and the R7000 is the 5Ghz N+AC AP - all working well so far... Thanks everyone!