Loving pfsense, looking for a recommended 802.11N AP
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first off, thank you, i've had pfsense up and running for several months now and am extremely happy with it blows my previous consumer router out of the water at all levels, performance and stability especially with VPN traffic has been huge increase. had fun getting unetbootin to create a USB stick that could boot the install was fun and a learning experience for my first time toying with freebsd. actually the USB stick was my windows mobile phone with a micro sd card in it,oh the irony, linux desktop creates bootable USB device out of windows mobile phone to install freeBSD…gotta love it...at least MS was good for something.
for the record my happily working setup is:
(overkill but you can never have too many spare machines around ya know?, has yet to peak 12% memory or cpu)
Jetway NC92-330-LF (dual core atom)
Jetway AD3RTLAN-G (3 port gigabit daughter board, 4 total)
1GB ram
laptop drive i had laying around
some ITX case from somewhere...interfaces:
WAN
LAN
WIFI
DMZi'm now moving on in my quest to remove network headaches from my house/home office...when the pfsense box took over routing duties my old router was converted to a wireless AP only, its fine (now that its only doing wireless and not dying under load), but its only 802.11G and i'm now working to upgrade my mediacenter PC to support 720P and 1080P HD content, the hardware upgrade was a software upgrade thanks to NVIDIA's VDPAU support in linux but my wireless network can't take the traffic, i get stuttering, especially in high bit rate scenes, you know the special effects scenes that were the entire reason for going HD in the first place. I have wireless N support on the media center PC (intel pro 4965 a/g/n mini-pci) and believe moving to N can solve my problem as my wifi network is pretty quiet normally.
tl;dr:
can anyone recommend a 802.11N AP or router that can operate as one? Ideally i would love a dual band a/g/n that could run N @ 5Ghz along with G at 2.4Ghz to avoid legacy device interference, like my cell phone. seems most such devices are routers and finding people using them as only AP's are few and far in between and given the difference in load, the difference in customer experience could be huge. not looking for industrial grade here, but obviously dropped signals and poor throughout suck as well, willing to strike a balance. WPA2 required.
cheers!
also: not sure if i hit the right forum, this or wireless? figured i could add a working setup here.
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802.11n is not (yet) supported by FreeBSD.
Or do you mean you want to wireless access for the users over a separate AP and then connect this AP by wire to the pfSense?
I'm using the Netgear DGN2000 (which also contains an analog ADSL modem).
Havent had any problems with that one (but then again… it's been only a few months since it's running so i might not have run into the longterm problems). -
xianthax,
If you're looking for a stand-alone 802.11n AP, which you connect through Ethernet to your pfSense or switch, then I'd recommend Apple AirPort Extreme. It's not the cheapest out there (and it's not open source), but in my opinion the best and most stable ones available right now. It's also very simple and quick to set up. I've deployed many of these in combination with pfSense and I have yet to run into any problems. The AirPort Extreme can be set to bridged mode and become "just an access point." If you need to extend the coverage you can simply buy additional AirPort Extremes or AirPort Expresses and create a seamless 802.11n network.
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xianthax,
If you're looking for a stand-alone 802.11n AP, which you connect through Ethernet to your pfSense or switch, then I'd recommend Apple AirPort Extreme. It's not the cheapest out there (and it's not open source), but in my opinion the best and most stable ones available right now. It's also very simple and quick to set up. I've deployed many of these in combination with pfSense and I have yet to run into any problems. The AirPort Extreme can be set to bridged mode and become "just an access point." If you need to extend the coverage you can simply buy additional AirPort Extremes or AirPort Expresses and create a seamless 802.11n network.
I agree that the Airports are nice hardware with a great feature set, but the lack of a standard configuration interface (either web, telnet or ssh) is a showstopper for me. I need to be able to configure these devices from any computer & OS I happen to be using as quickly and easily as possible, sometimes over a tunneled connection, and I want to be sure that I will still be able to in the future as well (when the config utility may not be available/supported/run on current software). Just be aware of that.
I can't really give you a better suggestion though. The only 802.11n access point I have deployed in any real environment is an Ubiquiti LiteStation SR71 build. I do have a client or two with Linksys 802.11n routers with dd-wrt installed, but I can't vouch for the quality of the hardware.
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ktims,
I agree with you that the requirement to run the Apple Airport Utility for configuration is a bit dumb … to say the least. The fact that there's no AirPort Utility for Linux can of course be a show-stopper for some. Having a web interface for configuration would be a much better solution. However, in my case, it doesn't really matter too much, as I normally have a Mac or Windows machine that I can use to access clients' networks with. Since I almost always have a VPN to my clients' networks, I can remotely connect and configure the AirPorts no matter what. Alternatively, I can put the AirPort Utility on a local machine and RDP to it from a Linux machine over the VPN.
I guess all I'm saying is there's almost always a solution. In my case, I prefer a solid, reliable hardware solution and I'll work around the slight inconveniences of configuration.
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I too would recommend that you stay away from 802.11n for the time being. If you are looking for something that you can set once and leave alone for years, I would suggest checking with these guys for a Cisco access point. http://www.optimumdata.com/Cisco-AIR-AP1231G-A-K9.html
I found that vendor through Ebay, another good source of these access points. (Search for AIR-AP1231G-A-K9) They are still nearly $600 new, but can be had for bargain prices in the used market. They will do everything you can think of and more.
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I've done some experimentation with hosting 720p and 1080p .mkv content on a windows file server and playing the files on a dedicated media PC conected various ways. 100Mb (full duplex) ethernet works with no issues, but 802.11g just doesn't seem to have quite enough bandwidth for complex 1080p sequences with any sort of encryption enabled, AES hardware assisted or not. I haven't (and won't) try this without WPA or better encryption enabled.
I'm curious if anyone has made this work with 802.11n. In therory 802.11g has 400mbit or so of bandwidth, but most setups don't get much more throughput than 802.11g speeds… but for this scenerio, the extra 5 - 10 mbit/s might be enough.
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I have tried 802.11g with a Linksys WRT54GL (official firmware) for high resolution videos as well. I'm using Ubuntu + MediaTomb as server and PS3 as client, but the video streaming stuck sometimes.
