Thanks for the suggestions on the router post I made a few weeks back! I think I’ll try to repurpose a no longer in use Mac Mini into being my OPNsense router on a VirtualBox VM! If that doesn’t work then I’ll consider buying one of the devices ya’ll mentioned in the last post.
But now I’m trying to look for an access point to flash Openwrt on and a managed switch to do my VLANs. I looked at supported devices on the Openwrt hardware list and looked them up on ebay and started saving some to my watchlist, and now I have a lot of sale offers that are gonna end in 1-2 days.
Based on Openwrt’s suggestions, I tried looking for devices that have at least 128 MB (1024 Mb) of RAM, 32 MB (256 Mb) of Flash, 2 cores, and support both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz connectivity. The specs need to support up to 1 Gbps Ethernet speeds, I haven’t really thought much about the Wi-Fi speed. Mesh isn’t required but I guess it’d be nice for future purposes. We use Cox, but we’re thinking about switching to T-Mobile, idk if it will be fiber (SFPs are expensive right? Sigh…). I want to find something that’s under $100, shipping included. These are the ones I have saved in my list so far (these are the regular listings):
Access Points
As for switches, I just need it to be managed (VLANs), have 4 ports (one for homelab PC, one for the AP, two extra for future). Here’s the ones I looked at:
Switches
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TP-Link Omada ES206GP (6-port, 4 ports are PoE) - ebay link
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Ubiquiti UniFi USG-PRO-4 (4-port, does include two SFP ports) - ebay link
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HP NJ5000-5G (4-port, 2 ports are PoE) - ebay link
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HP MSM720 (4-port, 2 additional SFP ports) - ebay link
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TP-Link ES205GP (5-port, 4 ports are PoE) - ebay link
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Cisco RV220W (4-port) - ebay link
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
FYI, RAM and flash sold to consumers is always in Bytes (big B); it’s only RAM manufacturers (and EEPROMs) that use the bit (small b) designation for storage volume, I think. If you’re using both to avoid any confusion, I would suggest the following instead: 128 MByte. No one will ever get that confused with megabits, and it’s the same style used for data transfer, which does still use bits: Mbit/sec.
I wish you the best of luck in your search.