So i’ve been thinking about upgrading my home network to take advantage of my unraid server supports 2.5G and i’ve upgraded to a WIFI 7 AP which also supports 2.5G ethernet and in genereal to improve and learn
Router will i most like go with RB5009UG+S+IN. But switch wise am i a little confused since i’ve been looking at CRS310-8G+2S+IN, but unsure if i should set it to SwOS or ROS. I might be running a few VLANs to seperate part of my network. Would it be better to setup the switch in ROS or in SwOS (aka would i loose some features/performace i might need?)
If CRS will be used as purely L2 device (VLAN-enabled switch), then SwOS is perfectly fine (if it runs without any problems that is). If you want to use any of L3 features, then you have to run ROS on it. Performance-wise, if configuration under ROS is correct, OS choice should not matter, in both cases it should switch traffic wirespeed.
The only difference might be in support for SFP+ modules, ROS might work with more modules than SwOS (in case you’re contemplating use of RJ45 modules). You can try using SwOS first and if things don’t play well, you can switch over to ROS and see if that makes any difference.
Why ? Because you will be able to manage both of your devices with Winbox.
Also if you don’t have any experience with Mikrotik environment then maybe it’s a good idea to start with RouterOS as you said that you will buy RB5009 and when you gain some experience you can try SWOS.
I got a Zyxel NebulaFlex NWA130BE-EU0101F. At the time i got it was it the best WIFI 7 according to reviews for home use and it was true WIFI 7 without the sacrifices other AP’s had (Cutting 5Ghz network in order to run 6Ghz ect) supports MLO and WPA3 and many other nice features.
Working on making a VLAN for a Smarthome SSID that is a Enchanted-Open network that only allow clients to join if i’ve added its MAC to the Nebula cloud authentication. Which should make it easier to get new devices on it just by joining it and no password, but also to seperate that network from the rest (Smart home devices aren’t know to be the most secure). Only issue i’ve had so far is some devices does not support WPA3 and simply won’t connect even though transition mode is enabled as should act as a WPA2 with WPA3 improvements. My Raspberry Pi 4 is one of them and have been forced to make a seperate SSID that is downgraded to WPA2. A fix for that would be to buy a usb WIFI dongle that supports WPA3 and plug it into the Pi
Good the zyxel has a stand alone configuration which I prefer.
Will be very curious as to your wifi results, throughputs with iphone or android phones etc…
