WAP hardware

[beavers]

I'm getting ready to pick up another APU2 from pcengines.ch to act as a WAP, but I thought I'd reach out to this group first to see what the cool kids are running. What do OpenBSD fans use for wireless AP hardware?

[TronDD]

I have an APU1 set up several years ago with an athn compatible WiFI card. If I get around to it, I'd change to an off the shelf WAP (a Ubiquity, maybe) instead of an athn card. While it has been mostly stable for my use, people report better success with a WAP attached.

Also switching to 5Ghz would probably reduce interference in my area.

[J65nko]

I use the standalone Wireless Access Point/Ethernet switch combination from my ISP.

[ibara]

When I lived in a tiny tiny apartment, I use one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/HooToo-Wirele.../dp/B00HZWOQZ6
It was powered through the USB port of my CAM-0100 (my OpenBSD/octeon router) and easily covered the whole apartment. Was essentially plug-and-play.

[beavers]

Originally Posted by TronDD

I have an APU1 set up several years ago with an athn compatible WiFI card. If I get around to it, I'd change to an off the shelf WAP (a Ubiquity, maybe) instead of an athn card. While it has been mostly stable for my use, people report better success with a WAP attached.

Also switching to 5Ghz would probably reduce interference in my area.

I'll be using 5Ghz as well, 2.4 is _swamped_ in my area. I'm going to test OpenBSD again, but I suspect better performance will be had with another BSD and so I'm leaning that way now.

I'm curious what you mean by "better success"? Just better throughput?

[shep]

I use a refurbished Trendnet TEW-732BR running OpenWRT. It was powerful enough for my needs, energy efficient, atheros 9 based, and had a small desktop footprint. Many of todays routers are linux based and per the GPL, have to publish source.

Openwrt takes the source and provides regular updates and allows customization.
Mine has the https interface turned off and is only accessible via ssh. I added bandwidth accounting and a simple email program.

https://openwrt.org/

More recent devices are presently available refurbished

https://www.trendnet.com/store/produ...ed-refurbished

[TronDD]

Originally Posted by beavers

I'm curious what you mean by "better success"? Just better throughput?

Throughput plus stability. The network falls over on occasion. I'm running at n speed which is relatively new in OpenBSD using athn on the access point and iwm on my laptop (as well as a mac) means newish/changing drivers at both ends of the connection.

Stability isn't bad enough that I've done anything about it. And I don't know how much throughput might be improved with a dedicated device so I'm not motived their either.

[beavers]

Originally Posted by TronDD

Stability isn't bad enough that I've done anything about it. And I don't know how much throughput might be improved with a dedicated device so I'm not motived their either.

What kind of throughput do you get, have you ever measured? I'm currently hitting around 20Mbit/s with an access point running OpenWRT and using iwn(4) on my laptop. While I'd like that to remain or improve, I still prefer the control and security of running OpenBSD if I can. So, I just pulled the trigger on an apu2c0 from pc engines, and will install the wle200nx. Is that the same card you're running?

[TronDD]

No, I've never measured it.

I didn't go with the card PC Engine sells. I found a hostap supported athn card on Amazon.

athn0 at pci4 dev 0 function 0 "Atheros AR9285" rev 0x01: apic 2 int 19
athn0: AR9285 rev 2 (1T1R), ROM rev 14, address 88:9f:fa:0b:83:46

EDIT: I just ran tcpbench(1) real quick between my router and OpenBSD laptop and barely got 10Mbps.

[beavers]

mmmmm, that's a bummer. I may just end up using FreeBSD. Anyone know what the state of wireless drivers on NetBSD is like?