this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
46 points (96.0% liked)

Selfhosted

39931 readers
463 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.

Resources:

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

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi all,

I'm slowly moving into the self hosted mindset specially for privacy, security and sailing the high seas. This community has been invaluable but I'd like to know which routers you use that fit well with this and plays nice with the services we're hosting.

I'm mostly thinking about wifi support, openwrt, vpn (not a hard requirement), vlans, etc. I know probably a networking community would be a better place for this question, but I think this might be useful for other "self-hosters"

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

How much wifi and open-source do you really want?

If you are willing to go with commercial hardware + open source firmware (OpenWRT) you might want to check the table of hardware of OpenWrt at https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi and https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864_ac-wifi. One solid pick for the future might be the Netgear WAX2* line. One of those models is now fully supported the others are on the way. If you don't mind having older wifi a Netgear R7800 is solid.

If you want full open-source hardware and software you need a more exotic brand like this https://www.banana-pi.org/en/bananapi-router/.

Both solutions will lead to OpenWRT when it comes to software, it is better than any commercial firmware but there's a catch about open-source wifi. The best performing wifi chips are Broadcom and those don't usually see open-source software support**. MediaTek is the open-source alternative and while they work fine they can't, unfortunately, beat Broadcom. As most hardware is Broadcom they have hacks that go behind the published wifi standards and get it go a few megabytes/second faster and/or improve the range a bit.

** DD-WRT is another "open-source" firmware that has a specific agreement with Broadcom to allow them to use their proprietary drivers and distribute them as blob with their firmware. While it works don't expect compatibility with newer hardware nor a bug free solution like OpenWRT is.