upgrade – Steveocee

Binned UniFi!

25/09/2023 by Steveocee

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

pfSense – A move to an easier life?

15/09/2023 by Steveocee

Even up to having the FTTP installed I was a MikroTik router through and through kidn of guy however running my CHR in the way I did meant some trade offs were made and my day to day work life forking further away from Mikrotik based or even theorised usage meant that my mind went that way for my home network as well. I did the unthinkable.

I’ve repurposed my DellR210ii which has been rebuilt with a Xeon E3-1220 v2, 8GB of RAM and an SSD. I also added in some Noctua fans to keep the noise down below a whisper as the rebuild meant it won’t be working hard as the whole install is now “bare metal” rather than the complexitiy of being virtualised.

Has it made a huge difference to my life? No. I still have a working router/firewall however it is now a decent GUI rather than an app that had to be levered onto my laptop (I’m also now a Mac boi) and to be honest the OpenVPN implementation has been a breeze to get working as has all of the firewalling and NAt rules as well as pushing on with trying to squeeze more from the LAN itself (10Gb backbone and tolerance).

I’ve gone for pfSense+ as it’s my home firewall and I qualify as such for the + usage FOC (for now) and I’m pretty happy with it. Time will tell but currently I don’t see me folding back to ESXi with a CHR running on top.

Slight Hiccup

25/07/2022 by Steveocee

OK so the first attempt didn’t go to plan. BTOR were under a lot of strain last week due to adverse weather. We’re reappointed for tomorrow so fingers crossed the fibre gets lit up this time.

PC Upgrades – Maxxing my platform

06/11/2019 by Steveocee

Following on from the motherboard upgrade I was left wanting just that bit more. I did a full delid and repaste on the 8700K but it didn’t quite quench the thirst so decided to take the plunge on an i9 9900K. Whilst the PC was apart I’ve dropped in another 16GB of RAM so for now I am classing my platform as maxxed out. Not that it was straining before, it’s absolutely not going to sweat now and this will also improve the render times when I’m creating videos.

Now to sit on my hands until H2 2020 when the new 3080Ti’s are out!

MikroTik SXT LTE Kit – The obvious next step.

09/09/2019 by Steveocee

I’ve recently been lucky enough to be included in a friends deployment of a MikroTik SXT LTE kit.
Having previously had a full hands on play with the kit, it is typical MikroTik quality, average quality plastic with a brilliant performance for a less than average price.

The purpose of the installation was to remove the tired fixed wireless link he had which was only the region of around 10/2Mb and wasn’t the most cost effective solution.
Being a semi rural location meant a fixed line solution wasn’t going to work and mobile phone signal wasn’t awful returning better than wireless access speeds.

The decision was made to put in an SXT and with the help of an unlimited data SIM card, he is getting speeds far superior to the FWA, cheaper monthly outlay and it’s unlimited which is something the WISPS tend not to do.

When there is 4G access this good it is a stark signal that there is light at the end of the tunnel for those who aren’t blessed by Openreach and their fibre.