[57north-discuss] Re: Replace the toys'r'us router

On Wednesday, 8 January 2025 07:19:13 GMT Iain R. Learmonth wrote: From my point of view, the thing we want first and foremost is a router that makes our lives a little easier. The current one has a WebUI that is painfully slow, has painfully short cookies and makes doing anything particularly hard. It would serve us best as a Modem/bridge to our own PPPoE endpoint, which ironically we had before I turned everything off (as it had fallen over too many times with no way for anyone in space to revive it!). There's a weird DHCP/Static/something else problem floating around that I am trying to resolve by slowly just making everything static :D On Alex's point, the network was simplified/torn apart partly so we got it under control of people in the space in a manner that was understandable and adminstrable. I'd like to keep that philosophy going forward, so that's requirement number one - Documentation and accessibility! The last time round we had this, it was irl's openbsd router and ansible [1], which gave us a good config store and was stable as fuck but I never felt confident/educated enough to commit changes/add requests for static IPs, so something a little more user friendly would be good - in the last x years, administration of most services have fallen to me, so let's treat me as the user it has to be friendly towards. As I don't feel clever enough to bring a Debian (or other) box up to being a router using the command line only, something other than just a box would be great. A box running an appliance software would work, btu we'd need to source the box. We do have a Juniper SRX-300 but no one knows JunOS, and we did have an Edgerouter lite 'back in the day' but it's missing in action! Personally, I'd like us back on IPv6, as I have IPv6 to my desk at home and I think our shared computer club network should at least rival my network at home. This'll need a tunnel of some variety to a provider as A&A don't give us an allocation for that at the moment (but their website may offer that). I would like our network to be a little more segmented going forward. Iain and I have discussed this a little already and, this plays in to that: An eduroam SSID/VLAN would be great, our current router won't like VLANs as it barely likes static IPs. I'd quite like to use RADIUS or something else to have logins for a 57N-members SSID for members that has access to all services on the network, 57N-guest for guests with limitations, and probably 57N-IOT as I'd like to expand home assistant and hide that random gear away from our main network too. Given we're discussing paying for a router I suspect we won't want to pay for an ASN that so far I don't think we've used in any meaningful way. This is a cool idea though, and I would be interested in seeing where it goes. I want us to have a network where we can offer this kind of stuff, segmenting off somewhere to play that won't take the main network down if things fall over. I think that aligns with: Primarily, I'd like us to have a network that I/we can fix when it goes wrong but isn't a project in itself that detracts from time hacking on other stuff. [1] https://github.com/hackerdeen/spaceble -- Hibby <hibby(a)debian.org> Debian Developer Packet Radioist MM0RFN