[Discuss] Reviving topic-Secure Wireless Router

[Richard Pieri]

On 9/30/2017 2:56 PM, Rich Braun wrote:
> With the new router, my Apple guy downstairs reports: "That totally
> fixed it!" Now we get a hundred megs through our wi-things. But it's
> a tad more complicated: I had to dig through the somewhat-expanded
> Netgear menus and to find separate SSID and auth settings for 2.4G
> and 5.0G internal components. I now have four SSIDs broadcast where I
> once had one.

I did recently upgrade to 5GHz, right after that last round of home
networking discussion because I discovered that the other notebook I
thought was 802.11n was actually 802.11ac and prices on .11ac routers
have dropped tremendously. So I got a Netgear R6400v2. I'd been running
openwrt on a TP-Link 802.11n router and it was fine and all but most of
the time I just don't want to play sysadmin and network admin when I
come home from work. So I got the Netgear instead of another TP-Link.

I didn't find the multiple SSID and auth settings to be onerous at all.
Quite the contrary: Netgear puts the 2.4GHz and 5GHz configurations on
the same pages so that both can be configured simultaneously. You *need*
to have multiple SSIDs with consumer devices because they don't have the
hardware and smarts to handle legacy devices transparently. Even Cisco
enterprise gear gets it wrong sometimes so the brute force approach
really is the best option for consumer kit.

I briefly toyed with the guest network options to see how they work.
They work. Devices on the guest nets don't see the primary LAN. I
wouldn't recommend this for any kind of serious enterprise environment
but it's more than adequate for home networks.

Really, the only "hard" thing was copying over a handful of port
forwarding rules.

-- 
Rich P.