Comment on Managed Switches & Openwrt AP Hardware Choices
grue@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
EDIT: I talked with a guy and totally forgot an important point, does reflashing the hardware prevent me from using features with the vendors i listed? I know companies can suck
If they’re software features and OpenWRT doesn’t implement them, yes. That’s not really the fault of the hardware manufacturer, though; that’s just a tradeoff you’ve chosen to make.
For example, I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to use Ubiquiti’s UniFi or TP-Link’s Omada software-defined networking to manage your OpenWRT-flashed device, but that’s just because OpenWRT hasn’t implemented it, not because installing it trips some kind of DRM fuse or whatever.
(I think OpenWISP might be the OpenWRT-compatible Free Software solution for that sort of thing, but I have yet to look into it myself so I’m not sure.)
Otherwise, I haven’t personally heard of any vendors intentionally sabotaging their hardware such that it disables itself when flashed with OpenWRT, but that’s not the same as an affirmative statement that it can’t ever happen.
Oh, I totally understand the software side would be different due to running different firmware, and yeah I wasn’t expecting to be able to use the vendor management systems. I was more worried abiut the hardware, but you cleared that up a bit :)
I’ve never heard of OpenWISP, but I’ll keep it in mind if I’ve ever got a bunch of devices I need to manage!
non_burglar@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Openwisp is an orchestration platform, but it is very overwhelming to the home/homelab user and not suitable for someone expecting the Unifi “single pane of glass”. It works best when most devices are the same model, otherwise you’re just making templates for many diferent device types.
grue@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Does there exist something more appropriate?
non_burglar@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Ansible. At least that I’ve found.
grue@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Admittedly I haven’t used Omada even though my gear supported it (before I flashed OpenWRT on it), but I don’t think it bears any resemblance to Ansible except in the most basic sense of being able to accomplish administrative tasks somehow.
What I was expecting was something that would provide a web dashboard showing all of my OpenWRT (and ideally, misc. other devices) at once, maybe with a nice diagram of the network topology and stuff like that.