I suppose I don’t have enough experience or interest in the Shield as a server, so I’ll take your word on that part. I don’t disagree that purely as a client, it’s overpriced today, although I’ve always been satisfied with mine. It’s always outperformed most other clients I’ve ever tried. What would you suggest as an alternative now, just a mini pc or something?

How does that make them useless? They may not work for a use case where you’re mounting network drives, but still work perfectly fine if you’re using them to connect to a media server.

We’re in an online echo chamber, we don’t need to look at reality. Just find the opinions that we agree with, and agree with us, and put 'em at the top!

Very uncommon to refer to NCOs or SNCOs as officers in branches of the US military that I have experience with. Interesting about Canada though, I wonder what other countries do

It’s not, everyone just loves to use the funny swearing buzzword

Sounds like we have similar experiences, I’m definitely looking at mesh. I’m tired of having multiple networks across the house! I’m definitely looking at separating IoT and guests to their own VLAN, which I understand Ubiquiti devices are really good at facilitating. Having notifications for new devices is a really nice feature that I never really thought about. Would definitely be nice to have tracking for that

Oh, very interesting. Yeah, I hate this AT&T ONT - I hate the idea of my ISP owning or providing any equipment. I was under the assumption that there weren’t good alternatives for the ONT, and that I was stuck with the AT&T-provided one, since fiber is relatively newer. Seems much easier for them to lock you into using their device. Thanks for the link!

Good points. It’s strange to me to think of routers and APs as just computers, or things that can be run off of a mini-PC or some kind of raspberry pi, but it seems like it’s entirely feasible to build up your network with those.

That’s seems to be what I keep coming back to over the past few days. The UCG Ultra looks perfect for what I need - I don’t want a router and AP in one device, nor do I need any of the security software that other Unifi devices seem to have - I run those separately. I think the UI and dashboards are what are really pushing me towards Ubiquiti, they look really great for displaying the info I want to see

Oh, that’s really nice. The more I hear about OpenWRT and OPNsense being so well supported, the more I lean towards those as my solution

Yeah, I definitely agree with splitting it up. Until lately, I haven’t been able to justify the cost of replacing my whole setup. But at the rate that my routers/routers-as-APs seem to die (maybe one every 18 months), it’s enough of a nuisance that I’ll just spend some money and do it the “right” way

Thanks for the link, I’ll have to look into running OPNsense on my Proxmox cluster. I’ve been holding off on buying a new server, having a server just for my networking VMs might be a good solution, thanks!

I have a pretty decent background in networking - I spent a few years in a network technician position and finished up my CCNA training while I was doing that work. I’ll have to look into Mikrotik, I’ve never actually heard of that brand, thanks for the recommendation

I’m not very experienced with OpenWRT - how sensitive is it to device changes? If your Barracuda dies tomorrow, do you have to purchase the same brand / model, or could you slap your saved config onto a similar device? Is there some sort of device compatibility to consider?

No issues or anything so far with the Unifi devices? That’s good to hear. Do you have any third-party integrations with your Unifi devices, or is it as locked of an ecosystem as I’ve read others say? I don’t think I’d mind taking the plunge, as long as it has good customer service and support.

I’ve had issues with .local on my Android device. Straight up doesn’t work. I had to change to .lan

I’ve had issues with .local on my Android device. Straight up doesn’t work. I had to change to .lan

The music isn’t tagged in Lidarr with Musicbrainz or whatever? Does Picard do more than that?

Yeah, learn it from a textbook!

Yeah, you and I have very similar use cases with this. Gluetun, VPN, download clients + *arr stack, I get it. I’ll be sure to update with a solution, if I spot one (when I get around to looking)!