As I’m in the beginning steps of sorting out my homelab, I’m starting to ask questions I haven’t asked before and come across conundrums I hadn’t considered previously. One of which is how to sort out pi-hole given that my ISP has locked down the router tighter than a tight thing.
As I had been reading about and watching YouTube videos, I had stumbled across Tailwind and the idea of VLANs is a nice one. That coupled with wanting to block ads and a new router seemed to the optimal choice.
Another thing is that I eventually want to get a Reolink POE video doorbell and Reolink E1 outdoor camera for my garden and so I’m trying to think somewhat ahead as the last thing I want is a server rack in my house. Aesthetically speaking.
So I stumbled across all the recommendations for Mikrotik and they’re really reasonably priced, especially compared to the Netgear Nighthawk thing I was looking at for ten times the price.
The Mikrotik HAP AX Lite is reasonably priced, does all the cool new stuff, let’s me set up virtual local area networks, has room for growth and has PoE capabilities. It seems to be the perfect choice. But is it? Because it seems almost too good to be true.
I’m not that picky in terms of routers, as long as it is rack mounted. I happen to use a Fortigate 101E that was no longer needed at work.
While it does support VLAN, I don’t do that on the router, as Fortigate can be a bit of a pain in the ass when it comes to VLAN tagging. I instead have dedicated ports for the various network I serve, each of which connect to the same switch.
On this switch I have each of those uplink tagged as access ports for the VLANs they represent. Then the remaining ports can be tagged as I please. A few extra patch cables, but only dealing with VLAN tags on aruba makes it so much better.
As for PoE, that’s best done on a switch. My Aruba powers all of my access points this way.
Consider a micro pc running opnsense (or Pfsense) instead.
Just look on amazon for “micro firewall pc” and you’ll see what I mean. Then you can look into separate APs.
It’ll cost more, but it’s a better step for your home lab.
Peotectli makes a small appliance.
Dell thin 1050 or 5010 extended has PCI slot.
Mikrotik HAP AX Lite
Looks like it’s 2.4ghz only, which is really odd. Mikrotik is also really difficult to configure in my experience.
Typically a better setup is a dedicated router, and at least 1 dedicated WiFi AP, that way you’ve separated the 2 and can upgrade one without the other as technology evolves. TP-Link Omada APs are decent, as are Unifi.
One of which is how to sort out pi-hole given that my ISP has locked down the router tighter than a tight thing.
Easy way in that case is use Pihole for DHCP and DNS together. Assuming you can disable DHCP on your router.
Oops meant the AC Lite. I think I was obsessed for multiple reasons, including intimidation, but I’m now coming around to the idea of trying something new. I guess I won’t get to do it as cheaply as I wanted to.
I don’t know about Mikrotik, but it might also be interesting to buy something, that is running on OpenWRT, an open source router OS. That way you would have maximal configurability. I recently purchases a GL.iNet AXT1800 for my own home lab (though I’m currently only using it for the isolated homelab, not for the rest of the house). You can even host stuff directly on the router with OpenWRT. I currently have Centos 9 repos hosted there and DHCP/TFTP for network installation of VMs via PXE boot.
pfSense either virtualized or on almost any cheap mini pc with more than one nic
But then what do I do about WiFi? Sorry if it’s a stupid question.
You can purchase wireless access points for fairly cheap from ubiquiti. Wire it into a switch and once you configure it you’re done. You don’t need the software for it running 24/7 unless you like metrics.
