Routers & Other Networking Stuff

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jeydax

jeydax

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joeboo_sl said:
Gotta say, I'm impressed with the Mikrotik

Right out of the box, this tiny little box(about the size of a paperback book) with zero external antennas has probably 1/3 more range than my old Asust RT-N66U, and faster as well.

I haven't jacked with upping the power at all, I may not bother, their documentation recommends against it multiple times, saying it could shorten the life of the product. Seems plenty powerful as-is.

Boggles my mind that a tiny box with no antennas that is half the price of my Asus runs circles around it in performance. Definitely liking the purchase.
Click to expand...
joeboo are you still pretty happy with this thing? I may recommend it to a coworker after reading up on it more. Almost tempted to get one myself too just for shits and giggles.
 
Joeboo

Joeboo

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Yep, a couple weeks in and it's still working great, no complaints at all and the thing is tiny enough to easily hide just about anywhere. It's actually so small and light that I just mounted it to my wall behind my computer with one of those velcro picture hanging 3M tabs. Between that, and my new Google Fiber service, I'm loving life. Everything is blazing fast, no outages, no resets/reboots, etc. I feel like I'm finally in the 21st century, lol.

My Plex server worked immediately without having to even jack with any port forwarding, and all of the wireless devices in my home re-connected seamlessly to the new router just using the same SSID and password that I used before on my old ASUS one (I was afraid there would be settings or connection issues connecting to a new device, but everything worked flawlessly). My TVs, Chromecasts, Amazon Fire stick, Android phones, Android tablets, Dropcam, etc) I have 13 wireless devices in my home and not a single one had any problems in switching over.
 
A

a_skeleton_03

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Okay I had a house built and I need to plan my network for the move. I am moving in August and am trying to plan ahead for my network in order to have everything ready for the first week of move in. It will also give me a good amount of time to monitor for deals and/or used hardware.

First I will give a very basic network diagram I made and then go over what's in it.

rCI8A97.jpg


So for the house I had them build me a 'server closet' in my game room upstairs. It has all of the LAN drops around the house, I am in the south and CAT5-E was pretty high tech for them so that is what I have, shouldn't be a problem. Each room has a single drop for a total of 5 drops. They all go to a patch panel there in that closet.

Server Closet
Patch Panel with 5 drops
DSL Modem
Router
PFSense
EdgeRouterX
One AP (most likely Ubiquiti)
8 - 16 port switch (POE capable)
Printer
Synology NAS
DEL R720 Server

Game Room
Gaming PC
PS4
Apple TV 4
Chromecast
iPad (x2)
iPhone (x2)
MacBook Air
Surface Pro 3

Living Room
Amazon Fire TV
One AP (most likely Ubiquiti)
Possible console

Guest Room
Apple TV 4
Laptop (wifi)

Jacob/Rachel Room (identical)
Console
Roku TV
Laptop (personal)
Chromebook (school)
iPad
iPhone

Misc WiFi devices
Nintendo 3DS
Android Tablet
Nvidia Shield (portable)
Amazon Alexa
Nest x2 (upstairs and downstairs)


So that is all of my devices that I will have most likely. I included the WiFi ones that really don't matter but I needed to wrap my head around everything I have going on.

Here is my concept that I am working with. I think I need/want a switch of some sort in every single room with a drop to allow expansion of devices. If it has an ethernet port it will be plugged in and not wireless is my mantra. The only exceptions will be the various laptops. All consoles and all media players will be plugged in. I need/want gigabit throughout the house at least to the switch, of course some devices won't do that but I need it available for every device that can.

With that in mind I was initially thinking on buying theEdgeRouter Xfor every single room, the reason being it is actually fairly cheap at only $50 a piece and it can be powered by the POE switch and also act as a POE passthrough. You can put them into switch mode but I am hearing they suck at that. I also don't need something I have to manage heavily. To have something hang off the CAT-5 and not need a wall wart for power though is a glorious concept. So now I am not sure that is the best move.

What I need is:

5 dumb switches around 4 ports each, I guess I could do up to 8 but there isn't a room with more than 2 devices currently needing a drop so only 3 ports use (1 for the trunk)
1 8-16 port switch that does POE at least a few ports
2 wireless AP's and I am leaning toward Ubiquiti, if I do so should I buy theCloud Keyor is that unnecessary? Do I need to go with Pro or is Lite good enough? Another brand?
1 edge routing device I have a little box for PFsense but haven't gotten around to playing with it should I go with that or an Edge Router X?

Any suggestions are welcome
 
jeydax

jeydax

Death and Taxes
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915
I'm not as advanced at networking as some of the others here are so my only input would be that I am hardcore nerd jealous that you get to set all of that up. Nerding super hard.


joeboo_sl said:
Yep, a couple weeks in and it's still working great, no complaints at all and the thing is tiny enough to easily hide just about anywhere. It's actually so small and light that I just mounted it to my wall behind my computer with one of those velcro picture hanging 3M tabs. Between that, and my new Google Fiber service, I'm loving life. Everything is blazing fast, no outages, no resets/reboots, etc. I feel like I'm finally in the 21st century, lol.

My Plex server worked immediately without having to even jack with any port forwarding, and all of the wireless devices in my home re-connected seamlessly to the new router just using the same SSID and password that I used before on my old ASUS one (I was afraid there would be settings or connection issues connecting to a new device, but everything worked flawlessly). My TVs, Chromecasts, Amazon Fire stick, Android phones, Android tablets, Dropcam, etc) I have 13 wireless devices in my home and not a single one had any problems in switching over.
Click to expand...
Well I ended up having my coworker get theRB951G-2HnD. I literally did zero research into the router prior to having him buy it and simply went off of what I'd read in this thread on it. I figured if it wasn't what I was hoping, I'd keep it and give him one of my ASUS routers.

Good god. When I opened up the router page to updated it I was blown away at the software that it has. I was so impressed by it I'm going to be replacing my two ASUS routers soon. Good lawd is that thing impressive. Increased his wireless range by a fair margin in his yard (his opinion, I couldn't test it the night I was setting it up because the cities got raped by a storm).

So I guess my only question would what is a comparable router to this one and what would the equivalent Ubuiquiti router be? Is either company better than the other?
 
gogusrl

gogusrl

Molten Core Raider
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Remember to try the Winbox management software. It's a LOT better than doing shit from the web interface. You'll find a download link on the bottom left of the login page.
 
jeydax

jeydax

Death and Taxes
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915
Haven't gone over to their place to take a look yet but the coworker's RB951G-2HnD I just setup the other day isn't working after their power reset. Modem is working fine, but when they connect to the wireless it just says "Connected, No Internet".

I'm going over there later but any idea why that would happen?
 
Palum

Palum

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I bought a cheapo Trendnet (granted an unmanaged 10/100 model) to avoid a bunch of new network drops just to bring PoE to a new corner of a room at the office and it's been a tank for about twoish years now. Powers enterprise telephony hardware just fine.
 
Palum

Palum

what Suineg set it to
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Holy shit, my Nighthawk R6700 has hardcoded DHCP leases of 1 HR, wtf.

Hopefully reserved IPs will not make it reset connections anymore...
 
Palum

Palum

what Suineg set it to
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So looks like it's better, though curiously after putting in DHCP reservations for all wired devices it's no longer sending out new DHCP leases as frequently to the wireless devices, but that could just be quirky timing or something.
 
jeydax

jeydax

Death and Taxes
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915
So I gave my coworker my old ASUS RT-N66U to use while I figure out how to use this Mikrotik RB951G-2HnD.

I have it working OK right now, but the max speed I can seem to get out of the wireless averages about 40-50 Mbps when speed testing. Wired connection is fine, just as fast as my ASUS RT-AC87U. But the wireless speed for the 2.4 Ghz bands are so far off from each other. All of the settings I could think of are identical (other than the channels it is on, but I've tested them independently so I don't have any extra interference).

Am I missing something? The wireless range is really no different than my N66U or AC87U. My coworker saw an improvement but he had a junk router prior.

It's at my place now - just told him to keep the N66U while I figure this thing out. Wtf am I doing wrong here? Google really hasn't helped too much.
 
Deathwing

Deathwing

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I'm think the Mikrotik is 2T2R, the N66U 3T3R, and the AC87U 4T4R.

What's the T-R count on the device(s) you are connecting to it?
 
Palum

Palum

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So I've been having intermittent connection issues - but they've been odd and I seemed to solve a bunch by setting up DHCP reseverations on my router. That said this doesn't seem to have permanently fixed the disconnect issue, but it has improved it.

Now however, I've got something odd happening and I am starting to wonder if there is a routing problem from my ISP? Here's a winMTR log:

|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| WinMTR statistics |
| Host - % | Sent | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |
|------------------------------------------------|------|------|------|------|------|------|
| 192.168.1.1 - 0 | 325 | 325 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 0 |
| No response from host - 100 | 64 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 100.127.64.72 - 0 | 325 | 325 | 6 | 10 | 63 | 9 |
| wsip-70-166-189-128.ph.ph.cox.net - 0 | 325 | 325 | 8 | 13 | 102 | 11 |
| lag-199.bear2.Phoenix1.Level3.net - 0 | 325 | 325 | 9 | 13 | 61 | 10 |
| ae-105-3505.bar2.Tustin1.Level3.net - 0 | 325 | 325 | 18 | 22 | 68 | 20 |
| ae-105-3505.bar2.Tustin1.Level3.net - 0 | 325 | 325 | 18 | 22 | 73 | 21 |
| 192.205.37.145 - 0 | 325 | 325 | 19 | 25 | 78 | 25 |
| cr1.la2ca.ip.att.net - 0 | 325 | 325 | 19 | 25 | 76 | 24 |
| 12.122.90.29 - 0 | 325 | 325 | 19 | 23 | 72 | 22 |

Why does my router keep trying to send traffic to someplace else that is refusing packets? I ran traceroute in a command window to confirm it wasn't just WMTR doing something dumb and it's showing the same routing.

Could that be the modem itself? I don't think it is because WMTR usually only hits routers on the way out.
 
ronne

ronne

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Traceroutes/mtrs from inside your lan shouldn't show anything for the modem at all, it's something else. The address right after it is IANA shared address space and everything past that is pretty run of the mill.

Do you have anything else on your network that could be running a dhcp server? That MTR looks like something local isn't responding before you get outside your lan. A second dhcp source fits your reservation bandaid idea as well. Check your modem, some of them are dhcp capable and it could be enabled by default.
 
Palum

Palum

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Ronne_sl said:
Traceroutes/mtrs from inside your lan shouldn't show anything for the modem at all, it's something else. The address right after it is IANA shared address space and everything past that is pretty run of the mill.

Do you have anything else on your network that could be running a dhcp server? That MTR looks like something local isn't responding before you get outside your lan. A second dhcp source fits your reservation bandaid idea as well. Check your modem, some of them are dhcp capable and it could be enabled by default.
Click to expand...
Well it WAS in bridge mode but that's a good idea to check again.
 
Palum

Palum

what Suineg set it to
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Yea still in bridge mode, NAPT disabled so I don't think it should be trying anything with DHCP, but honestly I'm not sure I could tell if it was since the interface to see all the network settings goes away with NAPT disabled.
 
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