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[#] Tue Jan 05 2021 17:02:01 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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Ok, I ordered a Mikrotik. Let's see if it's as good as everyone says it is.
I'm excited and looking forward to it. Most of the bad reviews are from people who couldn't figure out how to use them, so that doesn't scare me.
950+ Mbps throughput on a 3 watt router that costs $50? Sounds too good to be true but there are hundreds of reviewers singing its praises.

Oh, and now that I've been an IT professional for almost three decades, I finally bought an RJ45 crimper :)

[#] Tue Jan 05 2021 22:03:45 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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I wish you guys would put links to thinks you talk about for those of us who have no idea. I mean, I know there are these things called Search Engines.... but... 

 

Tue Jan 05 2021 17:02:01 EST from IGnatius T Foobar
Ok, I ordered a Mikrotik. 


[#] Wed Jan 06 2021 08:05:34 EST from Nurb432

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Lol

Tue Jan 05 2021 17:02:01 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

Oh, and now that I've been an IT professional for almost three decades, I finally bought an RJ45 crimper :)

 



[#] Wed Jan 06 2021 13:38:29 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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All I had to go with was darknetuser's message praising them. Then I shopped and read reviews.

The router I chose is a Mikrotik hEX RB750Gr3 [ https://mikrotik.com/product/RB750Gr3 ]. It looks like a typical 5-port consumer grade router. As far as I can tell, Mikrotik seems to be the best kept secret among people who buy a lot of routers and switches. I didn't even know about them, and I'be been in the data center business for 20 years.

Nearly all of the reviews for this router say that it does what they claim it does. Sustained 1 Gbps throughput, low price, low power consumption. That's all I want. I don't do anything fancy at the edge.

I like how they run the same software and feature set on every model from the smallest to the largest. I like how this model is optimized for wall mounting. And I like the fact that their monitoring software is called "The Dude".

[#] Wed Jan 06 2021 14:25:43 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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Thanks!

Wed Jan 06 2021 13:38:29 EST from IGnatius T Foobar
 And I like the fact that their monitoring software is called "The Dude".

 



[#] Wed Jan 06 2021 17:39:12 EST from darknetuser

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Oh, and now that I've been an IT professional for almost three
decades, I finally bought an RJ45 crimper :)



Congratulations on the crimper purchase.

I got mines from a hardware store on discount. Rusty as heck. They work, though.

[#] Wed Jan 06 2021 17:41:39 EST from darknetuser

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Ok, I ordered a Mikrotik. Let's see if it's as good as everyone says

it is.

Congratulations on your purchase too. Which board did you get?

The thing with Mikrotiks is that they are designed for their big customers, so you can expect design decisions that don't make sense for you, but made sense for the firm funding the development :) Still I think they are hard to beat for the price.

I hope you like your board.

[#] Wed Jan 06 2021 18:35:29 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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Ironically, as the least "network-ey" guy here, I've had mine since 2001, but I think I couldn't find it when I remodeled my study. 

And I have a Google Mesh - because I was tired of messing around with the traditional way - and mesh just works so much better in a consumer application. 

 

Wed Jan 06 2021 17:39:12 EST from darknetuser
Oh, and now that I've been an IT professional for almost three
decades, I finally bought an RJ45 crimper :)


 



[#] Wed Jan 06 2021 23:57:15 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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I suppose I haven't always "not had" a crimper. For the longest time I just borrowed one from work when I needed it, or just made the cable assemblies there. Since I've been working at home for the last four or five years that's not exactly convenient anymore. I've mostly gotten away with just terminating my cable runs on keystone jacks, and using pre-assembled patch cables since then. But now I want to do an even nicer installation with cut-to-length cables everywhere.

The Mikrotik I ordered is a very basic one, the hEX RB750Gr3. I don't need wifi since I have a dedicated access point in the middle of the house. Both the specs and the reviews say that this model does just fine maxing out a gigabit Internet connection, which is what I have. The more I read about Mikrotik the more it seems like they are everywhere and most people just don't know it. I'll bet their stuff is all over the place in hotels, cell towers, etc. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen a Mikrotik white box in a hotel room.

Router on a chip! There's nothing in there except a Mediatek MT7621A SoC [ https://www.mediatek.com/products/homeNetworking/mt7621 ] and some passive components. This is so cool. I know SoC have been the heart of smartphones and other small computers for a while now, but this one is designed as a router/switch on a chip, and now it's clear how Mikrotik can make small routers so inexpensive.

[#] Thu Jan 07 2021 00:43:08 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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So, my house has an entry point off the garage where there is a "data box" - this is popular in the homes in Arizona that were built around 95-2001. Your whole house speaker system is there, and your cable drop terminates in there from the outside box, so your cablemodem, which is increasingly your router, go there too. 

Anyhow - there are drops into the two downstairs "bedrooms" and one is a kind of bonus room - designed to be a home office, really. Anyhow... so I have limited ethernet into a guest bedroom and my study, and from that drop I have switches galore - the majority of my machines are wired in there. 

But the rest of the family, all their iPads, iPhones, Macbooks, Surfaces - as well as mine, when I venture out of my cave - The TVs, stereo receivers, my wife's upstairs office, My daughter's desk in her room, the IoT devices, the doorbell, the fridge and dish washer, her Wii, then WiiU, then Switch... 

It is a 3000 sq ft split level with a big room dead center, a raised kitchen... it is super open, but there are also walls everywhere. 

And getting WiFi all around that, the first few years we were here - was a hodgepodge and required a lot of support. Kid's room is in a very difficult corner - and so I was always getting bitched at about poor throughput in that damn Nintendo FPS squid game... 

Google Mesh made it easy for them. I've got a number of routers and different subnets that would make you shake your head, most likely - that work for me. And ultimately, most of my stuff never goes through the Google Mesh. 
But all the domestic stuff does. 

 

Wed Jan 06 2021 23:57:15 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

I suppose I haven't always "not had" a crimper. For the longest time I just borrowed one from work when I needed it, or just made the cable assemblies there. Since I've been working at home for the last four or five years that's not exactly convenient anymore. I've mostly gotten away with just terminating my cable runs on keystone jacks, and using pre-assembled patch cables since then. But now I want to do an even nicer installation with cut-to-length cables everywhere.

The Mikrotik I ordered is a very basic one, the hEX RB750Gr3. I don't need wifi since I have a dedicated access point in the middle of the house. Both the specs and the reviews say that this model does just fine maxing out a gigabit Internet connection, which is what I have. The more I read about Mikrotik the more it seems like they are everywhere and most people just don't know it. I'll bet their stuff is all over the place in hotels, cell towers, etc. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen a Mikrotik white box in a hotel room.

Router on a chip! There's nothing in there except a Mediatek MT7621A SoC [ https://www.mediatek.com/products/homeNetworking/mt7621 ] and some passive components. This is so cool. I know SoC have been the heart of smartphones and other small computers for a while now, but this one is designed as a router/switch on a chip, and now it's clear how Mikrotik can make small routers so inexpensive.

 



[#] Thu Jan 07 2021 12:48:13 EST from LoanShark

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IG waits to buy a crimper until crimpers have become obsolete.

I Want Wireless Everything>

[#] Thu Jan 07 2021 13:03:29 EST from IGnatius T Foobar

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I'm sure that was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm one of those nerds who only uses wireless for portable devices. Anything that stays in one place, gets wired.
Since I own my home I can drill holes in the walls and do other intrusive things that a renter couldn't or wouldn't do.

Let me give you something better to poke at: I'm still installing Cat5e with its prehistoric 1 Gbps speed limit.

[#] Thu Jan 07 2021 16:17:28 EST from darknetuser

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2021-01-07 13:03 from IGnatius T Foobar
I'm sure that was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm one of those nerds who only

uses wireless for portable devices. Anything that stays in one place,

gets wired.

We love you!

For the record, I am like that myself.

[#] Thu Jan 07 2021 17:39:32 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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The only device that I could have wired that I use wireless is my MBP and a couple of of other laptops that I mostly use as "auxiliary devices." I'm out of switch ports where it sits, and I've just been lazy. I should hook up another switch and just run some drops around for those machines. But yeah, if there is a wired connection, I prefer it to, outside of portable devices that I use primarily in a portable nature. I actually have USB Ethernet dongles and OTG adapters so I've had tablets and phones connected over ethernet, at times. 

 

Thu Jan 07 2021 16:17:28 EST from darknetuser
2021-01-07 13:03 from IGnatius T Foobar
I'm sure that was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm one of those nerds who only

uses wireless for portable devices. Anything that stays in one place,

gets wired.

We love you!

For the record, I am like that myself.

 



[#] Thu Jan 07 2021 18:30:28 EST from Nurb432

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For a house that is wired well, i have had decent luck with Ethernet-over-powerlines.  I use them in my garage to get network out to my miners.  ( free cooling in the winter )



[#] Thu Jan 07 2021 18:36:33 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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I've had mixed results, tending towards unsuitable. :)

Thu Jan 07 2021 18:30:28 EST from Nurb432

i have had decent luck with Ethernet-over-powerlines. 



 



[#] Thu Jan 07 2021 18:41:18 EST from Nurb432

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I think it all depends on the house and how its wired.  I do have one room where it sux.  But in general it does ok for me. Saves me digging into the attic, which is a REAL nightmare in my house. No room to move around up there. Late 50's truss system. Dreadful construction.  When i move again going to build from scratch again and pre-wire before the walls go up, like i did a couple of my houses.

Friend of mine is now using these modules for his external garage/shop, as WiFi couldn't make it thru the walls, and he didnt want to dig a trench. ( concrete )



[#] Thu Jan 07 2021 21:23:45 EST from LoanShark

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2021-01-07 13:03 from IGnatius T Foobar
I'm sure that was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm one of those nerds who only

uses wireless for portable devices. Anything that stays in one place,

gets wired.

It was about 95% tongue-in-cheek.

At home, I have 3 devices wired: a Linux/Windows dualboot PC, a Blu-Ray player, and the smart TV.

Apart from that, I have 1 phone, 1 laptop, my girlfriend has 2 phones, 1 ipad and a laptop. All those devices are wireless.

More to the point the last two jobs I've worked have been sorta semi-wireless. The startup I worked at from 2011-2018, we used wifi every chance we could and only a few people who had bad signal ever ran a wire.

Current job is a little more wired but we're in a denser building, subletting a corner from the fintech corp that is incubating us, most people get a little too much interference for our startup's dinky wifi to work well.

At home, the wifi works fine. 5GHz works well if you're in the same room as the router; I'm currently sitting 6 feet from a RAX48. The RAX48 is configured with band steering enabled, which is not perfect, but most of the time it works well enough that devices fall back to 2.4GHz transparently if you walk to another room. Occasionally you just have to disconnect/reconnect if a device is trying to use the wrong band for the room.

So basically... the fixed devices are wired, and the portables are not. :) Back when we used to have an iMac in the bedroom, 10 years ago, we ran a loooong ethernet cable across the floor to the living room and the cable modem/router. That was a shitty solution, and we're not going to do that again, but we're not going to put a PC in the bedroom again either.

[#] Fri Jan 08 2021 00:26:07 EST from ParanoidDelusions

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So, I think a major difference is you guys are living on the East Coast - the homes out there are generally OLD, and they were built way different.

In Phoenix, probably 95% of the growth is after 1990.

We're almost entirely concrete slab foundation. Very few basements.

Our attics aren't really like your attics either.

The house in Ohio was fantastic. I could drop wires down the heat returns into the basement, run them along the rafters in the floor, take them up through another exchange to the attic, and then drop them back down into a 2nd floor room.

The house in Ohio was 6000 sq ft including the basement, though - the major problem was length of runs from the study, off to the far east side of the home, into the rest of the place where the living spaces were. There was also a formal living room and a full bar between the library and the living areas proper. My neighbors were all at least an acre away in every direction. When we moved in, my sister-in-law walked all the way down to the edge of the property at the street to steal a neighbor's open WiFi connection.

Here, my whole house is on a 8500 sq ft lot. I've had conversations with my neighbor on one side through a side window while he was in his side yard, in a normal volume of voice. There are 15 houses in the area of my LOT in Ohio. I'm bombarded by WiFi signals on every frequency.

And the walls are all paper-thin Chinese drywall. No old brick, no plaster on lathe, never any non-artificial stone. Phoenix will be desert again 50 to 75 years after mankind has disappeared. 

Thu Jan 07 2021 18:41:18 EST from Nurb432

I think it all depends on the house and how its wired.

 



[#] Fri Jan 08 2021 06:41:13 EST from nonservator

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The only wireless device I trust is an old school infrared remote. Everything else is a ridiculous inefficient joke.



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