The Home Networking Megathread - Yes the OP is out of date

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Home Networking Megathread - Yes the OP is out of date

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wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

Busy Bee posted:

I intend on traveling in a few weeks and want to be logging in from the country I'm based in.

There are three possibilities here:

1. If your company cares where you're logging in from, then like everyone else has said doing this will 100% be putting your job at risk if you get caught as you are intentionally trying to deceive them.
2. If your company doesn't care, but you need to access services that will be a pain in the rear end if your IP changes or is coming from an unexpected country, then your company should be providing a VPN solution for you that they approve and support and this is a problem for IT to solve.
3. If your company doesn't care where you're logging in from and it doesn't matter for whatever you might need to do then this is pointless and you shouldn't bother.

Either way there's no good reason to be using company equipment on a personal VPN, especially not any commercial VPN service.

That said if you just want to access your home streaming providers in another country or whatever then the travel router is the way to go. It's transparent to whatever's connected behind it and is also very useful for getting multiple devices on to hotel WiFi.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2023 20:55

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 17:43

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

Z the IVth posted:

Any ideas on what the problem is likely to be here? I can imagine the wall cable being problematic but why would it start at 500 and then drop to 100 spontaneously? All the baseline speed tests were with the same device (android phone) at the same distance from the router and were replicable with my desktop.

If the cable is hosed in some way it could initially negotiate gigabit speeds and then drop back to 100mbit at some point after errors. 100mbit only needs two of the four pairs to work properly, gigabit needs all four.

If it works fine with a different cable, the problem is almost certainly the cable.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2023 16:10

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

All else being equal, assuming providers that are actually trying to provide good service, a cable provider should always be able to do better than a wireless provider. It's just a matter of how much RF bandwidth is available and what SNR can be achieved, and wired always beats wireless on those points unless the wire really sucks.

I personally would never consider a wireless internet connection as a primary service in a densely populated area. They're fine as a backup, but their use as a primary connection should be limited to places that can't get a wired link at all or can only get some poo poo-tier DSL.

Of course all else is not equal, if Comcast sucks in your area or the price is really substantially better while the difference in service doesn't matter for your use case then it might be worth considering.

If you own the modem and bought it unlocked from a general purpose retailer then it should be usable with any provider that it's compatible with. You may have to look up frequencies in use in your area to be sure of that. The ones sold directly by the cell companies tend to be locked to their service AFAIK.

wolrah fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Oct 6, 2023

# ¿ Oct 6, 2023 19:23

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

fknlo posted:

My desktop is the only thing hard wired, everything else in the house is running off wifi.

Did you have this device configured to match your old network settings or was whatever machine you were using for testing the only client on the network? Both speed and range of a WiFi network will be affected by the number of active clients.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2023 01:21

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

Kibner posted:

I got ipv6 working on my fancy router! don't know if I did it correctly but it works! I went for SLAAC with DHCPv6 stateless server because it seemed the least fussy while still doing everything I think I need it to? (some of you network experts here might need to chime in lol)

As a general rule that's what you want, SLAAC for addressing and stateless DHCPv6 for additional options. Stateful DHCPv6 only really matters if you care about selecting a specific IPv6 address for a client, which is generally unnecessary and actually doesn't work at all with Android clients (because Google went out of their way to break it and has been stubbornly refusing to reconsider for years).

Good job!

# ¿ Nov 2, 2023 17:51

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

The easiest way would be to just set up rules in your router/firewall to allow certain systems you want to use for administration to access the management network.

One notch beyond that would be if you have VLAN-capable switches any good NIC will allow you to use tagged VLANs, at which point you just set your switch(es) to deliver the management VLAN to the appropriate port(s)

You could also use an entire separate NIC in your management host(s) if you wanted to have the management network be physically separate, or even set up a cheap dual NIC machine as a dedicated management box that you remote in to from your normal use machines.

I do the first two myself. My desktop connects directly to three VLANs, my laptop also does when wired, and then my laptop and phone can also reach the other networks through the router when on WiFi.

The other two options are too paranoid for my tastes but IMO building an overkill home network is as much about learning as it is about having fun pretending your home network is a lot more serious than it really is, so do whatever fulfills your wants and needs.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2023 05:22

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

codo27 posted:

Son of a loving bitch. I have a HTPC with uBlock but thats more tedious, and I've read that uBlock may no longer be effective anymore either.

No matter what they might do against uBlock, they can do it more easily against DNS-based blockers. Until Google manages to kill browser-based ad blocking altogether it will always be more effective than Pihole.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2023 07:27

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

SwissArmyDruid posted:

Still only GbE? In 2023? For prosumer hardware? Hard pass.

It's not prosumer hardware though, it's basically designed for techie people to set up for their non-techie family/friends who can barely be convinced to ditch the ISP shitware. For that purpose where I could stick it in my grandparents' house and troubleshoot/manage their poo poo from multiple states away it seems like a brilliant little device.

Binary Badger posted:

Definitely more a SOHO kinda deal, other than that you can manage it with the UI Network app which still requires Java ITYOOL 2023..

This one is like the Dream product line in that it runs its own controller and can't be managed externally. The UXG-Lite is more or less the same thing but managed by a separate controller and lacking integrated WiFi.

Zero VGS posted:

I want to try out a straight-up powered amplifier for my wifi to help reach a far-off hotspot. Not a repeater, just injecting some juice into my antenna cable. Everything I'm seeing on Amazon is either $30, or $300. Is there like midrange version of one of these?

https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Booster-801-11b-Repeater-Extender/dp/B0BLYMC31D/

Something like that could potentially be useful in a point to point link if connected to a directional antenna but almost certainly not otherwise, and you'll of course be limited to 2.4GHz 20 MHz 1x1 modes.

Perplx posted:

I have 3gb right now and it�s pretty cool for usenet, takes longer to extract than download now.

Same, it's been the better part of two decades since I last saw an extract queue but when I finally got a 2.5/10G switch so my server could actually make use of my 2 gig connection that apparently found the limits of my array of shucked WD drives.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2023 18:40

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

M_Gargantua posted:

"Fiberoptic" and "Cheap" are not compatible.

Not as cheap as copper, sure, but for the sorts of things the kind of user who cares about price is likely to be doing with fiber it's still pretty cheap.

We're in a world where basic desktop switches with 8x2.5G copper and 1x 10G SFP+ or 4x 2.5G copper and 2x 10G SFP+ can be had for $50 and almost every rack-size switch worth a poo poo has had at least two SFP ports for well over a decade. Optics cost $25 at each end and patch cables can be easily custom ordered to size for less than a dollar a foot.

If one has an application where fiber offers real tangible benefits and it's possible to run preterminated cables I don't see any good reason to choose to run copper anyways.

M_Gargantua posted:

To assuage you in the crowd who are offended by this horrid code violation, when I pulled the run to my shed (30A 240Vac Split Phase + 1x Cat 6 + A bundle of 8 fibers) I wrapped all the data stuff in its own nylon abrasion sleeve before the pull.

If you ran 8 fibers why bother with the questionable copper as well? I'd be more sympathetic to someone who just YOLO'd a Cat6 or two in to their power conduit out because it was all they could do, but to do the right thing and then go out of your way to do the wrong thing alongside it just seems silly.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2024 17:55

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

I don't think you can do 5G at your price point unless you already own a 5G USB modem that works in Linux or are willing/able to tether a travel router to your cell phone's hotspot mode.

GL.inet (who make some of the most popular travel routers) has a product for 4G for $150T though: https://www.amazon.com/GL-X750V2-Certified-EC25-AFFA-Installed-Dual-Band/dp/B08TRCSSZ4/

They do also have a 5G product but even with the $100 discount Amazon is offering me right now it's still firmly double your price point: https://www.amazon.com/GL-iNet-GL-X3000-Multi-WAN-Detachable-WireGuard/dp/B0C5RCQ8N5/

# ¿ Mar 15, 2024 00:00

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

Usually the issue in reaching N feet, where N can optionally be attenuated by walls of different thickness and materials, is not the radio in the gateway device being able to transmit with enough strength. Instead, the issue is that the (often mobile) device can�t send the same signal back, both because it�s a lower-power device, and because you can�t tweak the transmit strength.

The only good solution is something that places access points in every room (preferably powered centrally with PoE and long Ethernet cables, or by using meshing), with lower transmit strength, and good roaming support.

100% this, it's really easy to make an access point transmit strongly enough to be heard across a normal residence using high-gain antennas and turning up the power to the legal limits, but with the exception of desktop PCs you usually don't have the option to upgrade antennas nor the battery power to even consider high power levels. Even then pushing the limits of power tends to lead to lower signal quality so your increased range usually comes at the cost of performance.

Imagine you're trying to talk with people throughout your home. Most people reading this can probably yell hard enough to can be heard most everywhere, though it may be muffled and/or echoing in distant rooms causing trouble understanding and at the same time someone in the same room is likely to be uncomfortable. Others might be able to yell back loud enough for you to hear as well, but small children might not be audible. If two people at opposite ends of the house try to yell back at the same time they might not hear each other at all but you in the middle can't understand either of them as a result. Those problems are more or less the same problems that happen when you try to have a single central high-power access point handle everything.

Putting more smaller access points throughout the space and running them at lower power levels is instead like having individual conversations in each area. No one's having to yell to be heard, people on different sides of the house aren't interfering with each other, etc.

It's not a perfect analogy but it should get the point across. There's a reason in commercial radio the single big transmitter approach is limited to broadcasters and extremely localized or low traffic radio systems where cell phones and larger trunked radio networks use a bunch of smaller ones that get smaller and smaller the more densely populated an area is.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2024 17:40

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

Yelling in a house isn�t the perfect analogy, because it isn�t accounting for time-sharing.
Imagine yelling in a house, but also needing to listen to what others (including in other houses) are yelling, so you can decide if it�s for you.

Good point. I kind of touched on this when referencing two other parties who can hear you but not each other (aka the hidden node problem) but wasn't really explicit about it.

Subjunctive posted:

I think this is a perfectly serviceable analogy, but as a parent lol at the idea of not being able to hear a small child who wants to be heard.

Perhaps being able to understand the communication rather than just noisy interference might be a better analogy there. I'm not sure, I wanted to avoid that kind of interference enough that I had the ports disconnected.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2024 20:33

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

ryanrs posted:

How does a lovely 2.4-only device even know you're turning 5 GHz on and off?

movax posted:

I wouldn't think a 2.4 only device like a ESP32-based thing would even be aware of 5GHz -- IIRC the analog front end / entire PHY there is simply 2.4 only. The world does not exist to its ADC outside of 2.4.

quote:

Dumb question... 2.4/5/6 all share the same BSSID / MAC from the AP, right? I don't think there is a different MAC per band, is there? But then WiFi 7 MLO, you do need to be able to tell the difference between STAs...

Nailed it in one.

The AP nearest my desk is a UAP-AC-Pro which has two actual radios, one for 2.4GHz and one for 5GHz. I have it configured to broadcast three SSIDs, one of which is exclusive to 2.4GHz, one exclusive to 5GHz, and one available on both.

The device is labeled with its ethernet MAC which is in the format x0:xx:xx:76:xx:xx. If I log in to it over SSH and run iwconfig, I see four "athX" interfaces, one for each single band SSID and two for the multi-band SSID. The two single-band entries are f0:xx:xx:77:xx:xx and f0:xx:xx:78:xx:xx while the multi-band one is f6:xx:xx:77:xx:xx and f6:xx:xx:78:xx:xx. There are also two "element-" and "vwire-" SSIDs configured on each radio using fa:xx:xx:77:xx:xx/fa:xx:xx:78:xx:xx and fe:xx:xx:77:xx:xx/fe:xx:xx:78:xx:xx which appear to be for wireless meshing and auto-adoption of wireless-only UniFi devices. I don't use either of those so I just disabled those, but it seems to show further how the concept works. Every unique combination of SSID and radio gets its own MAC/BSSID.

How this loops back around to lovely IoT gadgets is that a subset of these devices, rather than storing a SSID and password in fact store a BSSID and password. Maybe it's to save space in EEPROM/NVRAM/whatever, maybe it's for faster association when the device wakes, maybe it's just so the device doesn't have to handle whatever unicode emoji barf someone put in their SSID for fun. Either way, if we assume the phone app is sending the device the BSSID of the AP it's connected to instead of the SSID of the network it all makes sense, the phone sends the hardware address of a network the IoT device can't ever see.

Shumagorath posted:

6/6E is barely a thing; what�s the upside of 7?

The main thing is multi-link operation, where instead of treating all three radios in a WiFi 6E/7 tri-band device as separate things they can instead be combined and used simultaneously to increase performance and reduce latency, especially if you have multiple active devices.

The other thing that's interesting for personal use is support for non-contiguous channels. With WiFi 6 a 160MHz wide channel has to be a single chunk of spectrum, which means it's always been really hard to use that mode outside of WiFi 6E's relatively clean bandwidth. There are only a few 160MHz channels available and if your neighbors' 5GHz networks happen to fall in the middle of them you're not going to have a great time. WiFi 7 allows the use of a pair of 80MHz wide channels separate from each other in a given band, making 160 on 5GHz viable for a lot more users. They also introduce support for 320MHz in the form of a pair of 160MHz channels, as well as a mix-and-match mode with 80+160 for 240MHz total. Both of these will be useful as 6GHz gets more popular and we start having to care about interference there too.

They also increased the modulation from 1024 QAM to 4096 QAM and allow 16-way MU-MIMO instead of just 8-way, but neither of those are going to substantially impact most users as the former is just for the best of radio conditions and the latter is hard to notice without a lot of active devices.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:31

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 17:43

wolrah: May 8, 2006; what?

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

The thought of using 60GHz in an indoors environment is loving hilarious.

There's a small niche use case for wirelessly feeding projectors and TVs mounted in locations that'd be hard to wire, but in those cases you can usually set the transmitter/receiver pair up to have uninterrupted line-of-sight where people aren't going to walk between them.

The idea that 60GHz was ever going to be usable for laptops or mobile devices to get online was always silly for sure, since anyone walking between the two points would interrupt the signal. I guess perhaps there might have been some uses similar to the TV/projector thing where a computer needed to go somewhere that was a pain in the rear end to wire but a 60GHz antenna could be stuck on the wall somewhere above head level.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 16:37

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Home Networking Megathread - Yes the OP is out of date

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