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Binned UniFi!

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More like sold them all but I’m no longer running the UAP-AC-Pro’s. As far as performance went, they worked fine, I had 3 in total, 1 in the loft space for the main house, 1 in the mancave and 1 out at the MIL’s who is on a UBNT wireless bridge for some free and easy coverage. I can’t really fault the UAP’s, the coverage was good and speeds were always plenty for what I needed.

Why Then?
I’ve fairly recently extended my house and needed to add another AP. For my work I use the very versatile Zyxel Nebula range and it just made sense to “hop” brand and move over. The Zyxel kit comapritively is slightly cheaper and I made the step over onto ax hardware being as I’ve gone Gig at home now as well.

Step in the Zyxel NWA50AX – The main reasons for using this AP are, primarily I work with this kit every day so why wouldn’t you? It’s WiFi6 capable so as devices are swapped out I can eek more performance out of the WiFi, they don’t require me to maintain a controller, Zyxel do all of this for you, the cost point on these is brilliant. I picked up 4 AP’s at a cost of £69 each and overall I have more coverage of the house and far better throughputs and finally the performance, my thorughput is noticabely higher now than it was running the old setup. This is likely in part due to now having 2 AP’s serviing the house rather than 1 but overall I’m very happy!

You can read a bit more about them here
https://www.zyxel.com/uk/en-gb/products/wireless/802-11ax-wifi-6-dual-radio-poe-access-point-nwa50ax

CHR completed! But not how I hoped it would be

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My long ongoing build of a 1U ESXi server to run CHR on has come to an end, a frustrating end that meant I simply couldn’t live with the noise it was kicking out because of the 40mm fans and constantly comparing it to my massively overpowered i7 mATX fileserver.

As a fairly large change to the home setup I decided to pull apart about 3 of my home servers and rebuild the main storage into the spare N54L and then rebuild the “Node” into an ESXi server to host the CHR. Quad port NIC in the Node and a quick install onto the Crucial M4 128GB and it was up and running, installed the CHR and it’s moving along really well and actually turning about double the traffic capability of what the “older” Xeon was doing!

So a really big shuffle around but now I feel like I’m actually starting to do my i7 some justice and not just using it for a ridiculously overpowered power hungry file server.

Whilst doing the work I had the dog in the cave with me (not that she was much help)

Home Router Upgrade

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It’s been a busy day or 2 for me getting parts together and getting ready for a fairly big shift around my home network environment. It’s all being done in the name of education as I want to run a CHR as my border router to give me some real horsepower for some scripting I’m looking at trying to do.

As part of the move around I will end up removing a MikroTik RB3011, HP N54L and a PoE injector and will be swapping over onto an RB260GSP (taking the place of the PoE and converting to fibre), a rack mounted server and a CHR which I’m currently about finished configuring.

Over the next few days I will be installing the 260GSP switch/converter and re configuring the CRS125 switch in the cave and then it should be about time to “cut over”  and get my CHR live.

This is all a test though and there is a possibility it’ll all move back if I can’t put up with the noise from the server in the cave.

6-config-moved