Not sure on Ubiquiti routers

[onikage]

Hello,

I recently moved into a new home and I'm trying to setup my home network. I currently own a Netgear R7000 router, but in my new house I have an On-Q/Legrand enclosure along with in wall Ethernet throughout. The enclosure is relatively small and I was thinking of putting a wired router in there with a switch and putting the Netgear in AP mode in a centralized room.

My problem is that I am having trouble choosing a router. I see the Ubiquiti line of Edge routers get rave reviews for their sheer power, but there are rumblings of manageability issues. I am an IT professional, but at home I don't like to spend a lot of time tinkering with things beyond initial setup. Considering all the devices I have, you wouldn't believe that statement, but still I'm used to consumer router setup and go. I get frustrated when I have to stop what I'm doing and spend 1-2 hours changing settings or researching things. The CLI would make it feel even more like work

I use UPnP and Port Forwarding when that fails to get my game consoles NAT free and sometimes tinker with the wireless radio channels. I don't currently use QoS or any other advanced features. Is there anything out there besides the Ubiquiti routers that are almost as good, but easier to manage? Or have they updated their GUI to the point that you can access most of these things through it?

TL;DR

• Need a router that is easy to manage for use in a small wiring closet
• Used w/switch for 6 Ethernet runs to rooms
• Netgear R7000 as WAP placed in one of the rooms
• Cable internet @ 125 MBps with my own Arris sb6183 modem
• Multiple game consoles, computers. connected devices in the house
• Will add security cameras in the future (maybe solve this with PoE capable switch)
• Will buy a switch too

 

[Blade Runner]

My house has an identical setup On-Q/Legrand with structured wiring although builder installed enclosure in a closet instead of garage .

I didn't attempt to install a wireless router after realizing ventilation would be an issue. I have a pfSense firewall/router outside the enclosure. It's not pretty however structured wiring has its benefits.

 

[onikage]

Yea, mine is in my master bedroom closet. If I were to put my netgear in there it would take up half the enclosure. Looking at the Ubiquiti equipment dimensions now, I'd have the same issue. Doh!

The pfsense hardware you built yourself?

 

[Blade Runner]

Yes. I have plenty of server grade hardware gathering dust

If you decide to DIY, I highly recommend buying a motherboard with dual Intel NIC because Intel is gold in the open source software world.

Outside enclosure: modem, pfSense device, 24-port Fast Ethernet switch, and wireless access point (Asus RT-N56U)
Inside enclosure without cover: 16-port Gigabit Ethernet switch with 8-ports lined into rooms with multiple input jacks

The Asus was initially inside enclosure and configured as a router. It began to drop Internet connection after discovering torrenting. It was replaced with an Asus RT-AC66U with dd-wrt firmware. It also began to drop Internet connection. That's when I considered different options. The pfSense can handle everything thrown its way. My internet connection doesn't depend on a consumer-grade router. Won't get fooled again (Thank you Pete Townshend).

 

[System Error Message]

when you say 125MB/s do you mean 1Gb/s? Its always better to minimise the amount of networking hardware you have at home for power reasons and its one of the reasons why homes use embedded. Theres the ERPRO/8 with 8 ports all CPU connected than theres also mikrotik with its varying routers.

The hardware you get depends on your needs (speed, features etc). x86 solutions usually allow installing more things but ubiquiti edgerouters can install debian packages if compiled for MIPS. The reason to go embedded is for power and space reasons.

 

[abailey]

when you say 125MB/s do you mean 1Gb/s? Its always better to minimise the amount of networking hardware you have at home for power reasons and its one of the reasons why homes use embedded. Theres the ERPRO/8 with 8 ports all CPU connected than theres also mikrotik with its varying routers.

The hardware you get depends on your needs (speed, features etc). x86 solutions usually allow installing more things but ubiquiti edgerouters can install debian packages if compiled for MIPS. The reason to go embedded is for power and space reasons.

I think he meant 125Mb/s since the modem he listed has a max supported download speed of 686Mb/s.

 

[Trip]

EdgeRouter-X. $60. No brainer. Even if you try and it and hate it for production in your home, it'd be a great swiss-army knife to keep on hand for on-sites. Everything doable from the GUI that you've listed. And if you need to get technical with advanced setups, the CLI is not that bad, really. It's even preferential -- all the inherent advantages of heirarchical, text-based config files make re-configs, duplication and troubleshooting WAY easier, especially for a networking admin like yourself. And in my experience, once set, it's set and forget. All of mine have been up for months without issue. As a bonus, the QoS (fq_codel+HTB) does a great job of smoothing out all endpoint contention and should handle your aggregate WAN bandwidth just fine (or come very close).

 

[onikage]

Thanks for all the replies. I pulled the trigger on the EdgeRouter-X yesterday. It came today and I'm actually getting it configured right now. I have accepted my fate, but the GUI isn't too bad actually. I know I'm going to give into temptation and dive into the CLI at some point against my better judgement . I must have misread the dimensions on these things the other day because they are TINY. Perfect for the wiring closet actually.

Thanks for the help!

 

[Trip]

Nice! By now they should come with 1.7.0 loaded from the factory (occasional older stock will have 1.6.6 still), so make sure you update and factory reset before doing your config. GL!

 

[JoeJoe]

What is the max routing speed of the EdgeRouter X ?
I think it about half as powerful as the the Lite model as it doesn't have hardware handoff.

It can't perform Deep Packet Inspection or traffic analysis, whereas the slightly more expensive EdgeRouter Lite can.

 

[Nullity]

What is the max routing speed of the EdgeRouter X ?
I think it about half as powerful as the the Lite model as it doesn't have hardware handoff.

It can't perform Deep Packet Inspection or traffic analysis, whereas the slightly more expensive EdgeRouter Lite can.

The ERX has a faster CPU, which means it can do QoS/traffic-shaping faster than the ERL, but apparently it has no HW acceleration so for simple routing it is slower.

Interesting point about the lack of DPI. I do not see this as a problem because encryption seems to be making DPI less and less useful.

 

[onikage]

Here's a link to the datasheet: link.

I've seen commentary where people say because it lacks hardware acceleration it's a no go. I'm not sure how that or the max routing speed translate into any real world restrictions on my usage at home with a 100 megabit connection.

Anyone else with the On-Q/Legrand enclosure mount things in there? I see overpriced mounting plates and I'm thinking there has to be a better way! @Blade Runner

 

[System Error Message]

I never look at routing speed, i always look at what the CPU is capable of.

 

[Nullity]

I never look at routing speed, i always look at what the CPU is capable of.

Do you go by Packets Per Second or another metric?

 

[System Error Message]

pps if it is not influenced by hardware acceleration. The problem is that the ERL's specs is based on hardware acceleration on layer 3 routing mode. Not particularly useful.
Mikrotik however has a more useful benchmark since i would consider the realistic performance by looking at their layer 3 routing mode with 25 rules. It gives an indication of speed when you have heavy use for it. NAT is essentially 2 firewall rules.

Another point about pps is that if you use PPPOE it will have lower performance because of the lower sized packets and the extra load. PPPOE is faster than PPTP though.

There are some hard facts that we know.
The broadcom dual core ARM A9 at 1.4 Ghz does about 500Mb/s of NAT
MIPS 24k is slightly faster than ARM A9 clock per clock, core per core for NAT
Each TILE core does 2Gb/s of NAT at 1.2Ghz without any rules.
All at 1500byte packet sizes.
When you add PPPOE into the mix the number slows down, sometimes by half.
It would be great to keep a fact sheet of CPU performance in pps for NAT, PPPOE, vpn of various CPUs we have in routers.

So while ubiquiti shows impressive numbers for their ERL and higher but the majority of the customers who buy mikrotik and ubiquiti hardware will end up not using the hardware acceleration because of filters. Its one reason why mikrotik is late in hardware acceleration when they realised some people dont use any rules in it (but the majority of their customers apply rules and other features) and that some traffic can be hardware accelerated. I've even asked about overclocking and got big no as replies whereas mikrotik allows some of their routers to be overclocked but there is a hack you can do with the system package to add more frequency choices to it. Imagine overclocking the TILE CPU to 1.5Ghz which is the highest spec listed by TILERA or gain even more performance from overclocking the PPC CPU.

So if we took an ERPRO and if it had to do NAT and PPPOE i wonder how fast it would be with QoS and firewall. One of the things i like about these routers is that you can get some with SFP so if you have fibre optics you wont need a modem and some mikrotik routers have integrated wifi + SFP + CPU connected ethernet and usb and POE in with mini PCIe for future expansion. They're actually perfect for all in ones and there is a company that has their own firmware that uses mikrotik routers, if they ever expended to the 9xx line it would make for an all in one user friendly reliable router. If only they would do this with their TILEgx line and have it cheaper (the chip has the support for all these things but the CCR line doesnt include it) than they could conquer the higher end consumer line. 9 real cores vs broadcom's hyped 7 core (4 ARM, 3 wifi) router.

 

[Blade Runner]

Here's a link to the datasheet: link.

I've seen commentary where people say because it lacks hardware acceleration it's a no go. I'm not sure how that or the max routing speed translate into any real world restrictions on my usage at home with a 100 megabit connection.

Anyone else with the On-Q/Legrand enclosure mount things in there? I see overpriced mounting plates and I'm thinking there has to be a better way! @Blade Runner

I don't remember seeing mounting brackets in the On-Q/Legrand website.