New router and rack

I have used some different routers since I got internet/adsl back in 1999 something. The last 10 years I have been using these. Oldest first.

 

 

Edgerouter 4

I decided to go for the edgerouter 4. I did read a lot of post why to go for the USG instead and. Ubiquiti have two series. Unifi and Edge Max. The AP I have is Unifi. So it would make sense to buy a USG router instead. This is quite confusing and even if you ask a question what to buy you will get different answers. I did buy the Edge 4 because.

  • It is faster then the X and Lite
  • I did hear that the USG gets very warm. As well as the Edge X.
  • I wanted an SFP port. I wanted to skip my existing media converter and put my fiber right into the interface.
  • I did not need PoE. I have an 8 port Aerohive swith doing the PoE task.
  • It seems to be a little bit more advanced
  • There were no models of the USG in the same price span.

You can find a very good comparison table here of the different Edge models

 

Case

  • The Edge will be used with 250 Mbit internet via Bahnhof. A Swedish ISP
  • 6-20 people will use internet
  • I will use it with 2 Unifi AP Pro
  • Two switches will be connected. An Aerohive 8 port PoE and A 24 port Mikrotik.
  • It will be rackmounted in a Toten 9U rack.
  • I will have two VLANS. Home and guest. The guest vlan is for tenants. As the room is in the basement I have an Aerohive ap130 AP just for this room.

 

I have used a Toten 6U rack in my garage before. This has now been replaced with the 9U. Toten is non expensive and in my opinion very good racks. I had problems fitting the Synology DS414 in there so there will be some more room there now as well.

My first step was to remove the Inteno box and extend the fiber cable. I wanted to pu the SFP directly in the ER-4 SFP port. One box and PSU. My internet provider is Bahnhof (Sweden). However you may also just extend the cable or dismount it if you want to place the Inteno media converter in your rack.

Disclaimer:

Usually you should not do this. The ISP may not like this. If you get any problems later on they may be unvilling to give you support. The other problem you may face is VLAN related. If you use other services like TV, telephone etc you might have a problem. I have been told that the TV VLAN is 21. You might try to use this. However if you are just using internet it will not be any problem.

Mounting the rack

The rack is just perfect. There are now plenty of room for my DS414. The edgerouter also fits perfect.

The Edgerouter

Ok, The rack is up, all cables are replaced and internet worked. I have not used ER before so I basically just ran the setup wizard. The SFP was put in eth3 and was found right away. My local LAN ended up in eth1. As i wrote before I wanted the Guest AP on the PoE switch. I think I had to use the router as “router on a stick” to be able to do this. And create vlans. However my knowledge how to do this was limited so i decided to skip this and do this later on. Instead I created a guest network on eth2 and connected the ap with an injector. I also created another wired guest network. Some firewall rules were added so the guest networks were unable to reach my LAN. I also did some portforwarding and added my duckdns.

 

Finally i did a speedtest. With my old Tomatosetup I got 150Mbit. Now I have 270Mbit. And in general it seems to be faster. I will continue to fix some things later on like chaning to NAT and add vlans.