this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
17 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

56957 readers
729 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
17
Managed Switches & Openwrt AP Hardware Choices (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 4 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) by Imaginary_Stand4909@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
3 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Thanks for the suggestions on the router post I made a few weeks back! I think I'll try to repurpose a no longer in use Mac Mini into being my OPNsense router on a VirtualBox VM! If that doesn't work then I'll consider buying one of the devices ya'll mentioned in the last post.

But now I'm trying to look for an access point to flash Openwrt on and a managed switch to do my VLANs. I looked at supported devices on the Openwrt hardware list and looked them up on ebay and started saving some to my watchlist, and now I have a lot of sale offers that are gonna end in 1-2 days.

Based on Openwrt's suggestions, I tried looking for devices that have at least 128 MB (1024 Mb) of RAM, 32 MB (256 Mb) of Flash, 2 cores, and support both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz connectivity. The specs need to support up to 1 Gbps Ethernet speeds, I haven't really thought much about the Wi-Fi speed. Mesh isn't required but I guess it'd be nice for future purposes. We use Cox, but we're thinking about switching to T-Mobile, idk if it will be fiber (SFPs are expensive right? Sigh...). I want to find something that's under $100, shipping included. These are the ones I have saved in my list so far (these are the regular listings):

Access Points

  • Linksys Velop MX4200 (Tri-band, Mesh Wifi 6) - ebay link

  • Zyxel NWA110AX (Wifi 6, Dual-band) - ebay link

  • Cudy AX3000 (Tri-band, Mesh Wifi 6) - ebay link

  • Linksys Velop MX5300 (Tri-band, Mesh Wifi 6) - ebay link

  • Ubiquiti UnFi U6-LR (Wifi 6, Dual-band) - ebay link

As for switches, I just need it to be managed (VLANs), have 4 ports (one for homelab PC, one for the AP, two extra for future). Here's the ones I looked at:

Switches

  • TP-Link Omada ES206GP (6-port, 4 ports are PoE) - ebay link

  • Ubiquiti UniFi USG-PRO-4 (4-port, does include two SFP ports) - ebay link

  • HP NJ5000-5G (4-port, 2 ports are PoE) - ebay link

  • HP MSM720 (4-port, 2 additional SFP ports) - ebay link

  • TP-Link ES205GP (5-port, 4 ports are PoE) - ebay link

  • Cisco RV220W (4-port) - ebay link

EDIT: I talked with a guy and totally forgot an important point, does reflashing the hardware prevent me from using features with the vendors i listed? I know companies can suck

top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 points 25 minutes ago

Please also consider mikrotik brand gear. I've been told they're especially easy to manage as one moves from manual control to something declarative like terraform(opentofu).

[–] grue@lemmy.world 1 points 43 minutes ago* (last edited 42 minutes ago)

EDIT: I talked with a guy and totally forgot an important point, does reflashing the hardware prevent me from using features with the vendors i listed? I know companies can suck

If they're software features and OpenWRT doesn't implement them, yes. That's not really the fault of the hardware manufacturer, though; that's just a tradeoff you've chosen to make.

For example, I'm pretty sure you won't be able to use Ubiquiti's UniFi or TP-Link's Omada software-defined networking to manage your OpenWRT-flashed device, but that's just because OpenWRT hasn't implemented it, not because installing it trips some kind of DRM fuse or whatever.

(I think OpenWISP might be the OpenWRT-compatible Free Software equivalent for that sort of thing, but I have yet to look into it myself so I'm not sure.)

Otherwise, I haven't personally heard of any vendors intentionally sabotaging their hardware such that it disables itself when flashed with OpenWRT, but that's not the same as an affirmative statement that it can't ever happen.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

128 MB (1024 Mb) of RAM, 32 MB (256 Mb) of Flash

FYI, RAM and flash sold to consumers is always in Bytes (big B); it's only RAM manufacturers (and EEPROMs) that use the bit (small b) designation for storage volume, I think. If you're using both to avoid any confusion, I would suggest the following instead: 128 MByte. No one will ever get that confused with megabits, and it's the same style used for data transfer, which does still use bits: Mbit/sec.

I wish you the best of luck in your search.