Intro / current solution
I’ve been following Turris from its first crowdfunding, but it was not the right time to buy it for me – I already had a MikroTik RB2011, which served me fine enough. Its WiFi antennas were powerful enough to cover the whole apartment OK-ish.
Since I’ve gotten FFTH though, problems started. The issue is that fiber enters at a different spot in the apartment, so the WiFi signal no longer reaches everything. So I bought a Mikrotik hAP Lite and set it up as a bridge. For some reason though, where the two signals overlap (RB2011, hAP Lite) – which happens to be where the work desks are –, latency got really bad (I suspect the clients were constantly switching between the two APs, but don’t know how to check).
I tried to fix that a few times, but it’s gotten worse, and then back to just being bad. So my current solution is to have just the RB2011 on and suffer from parts of the apartment simply not having signal. This is extremely likely a case of PEBKAC, as I am not super-network-savvy and while MikroTik is really quality stuff, I have serious trouble figuring out how to set things up.
…which brings me back to Turris and its more familiar OpenWRT/Linux
Problem/situation description
So I’m thinking of selling my MikroTiks and replacing them with Turris.
But the building’s challenges remain and I’d need to figure out how to fix them. As this would be quite an investment, I’d like to get it right the first time.
Problems:
- proper thick walls (100+ year old building)
- laying cables would be very hard and labour-intensive and the would require drilling as well as routing around doorframes etc.
- FFTH enters cca. at one extreme corner and there are about 3 thick walls to the other end
What I need/want:
- router at the FFTH entry (I have a FFTH modem, but if it’s better to plug it in directly into Turris, happy to do that)
- at least 2 ethernet connections for my small servers
- WiFi to cover 120m² through thick walls, cca. 14m radius from where the FFTH entry is
- typically 8-22 devices are connected via WiFi
Any suggestions which set-up to choose and how to set it up?