Hello,
my Bintec Router RS353j runs out of maintenance in october 2024, so I need to replace it.
My currently setup is the rackmounted RS353j, three wifi AP's Bintec W1003n and one Wifi AP Bintec WO2003n. Wifi APs central managed by RS353j Wifi Controller.
RS353j managed 5 concurrent IPSEC Connections with hardware acceleration.
The replacement should be rackmountable. Ther is no need of integrated wifi. It should be able to control four APs and support fast rooming, VPN with Wireguard for min. 5 concurrent connections.
Three Wifi APS are inhouse usind and one AP is for outdoor using. They are connected over PoE. Shutdown wifi APs with SNMP. And WiFi Power should be able to adjust to minimum.
Currently WAN ist 500 MB/s but in future maybe 1 GB/s is possible. It is connected via fritzbox cable configured for an exposed host.
A former post for a recomandation for a rackmountable router was answered with Mikrotik RB5009UB+S+IN, so I had a look to this device.
It looks like it is usable, but in ToH it is listed with OpenWRT snapshot not with release. Snapshot page tells me there is no specific expiry date for snapshot so I am unsure if it is stable and usable for a non experient user and does it get easy to use updates.
What do you think? Is the Mikrotik RB5009UB+S+IN the right choice or are there more useable alternatives?
For inhouse APs there are Mikrotok CAP AC and for outhouse use WAP AC which works with OpenWRT, but don't know if WAP AC uses PoE. Are there other recomdantions?
As brada4 suggested, you're coming from a ~500 buck router and are now looking at ~200 buck replacement, that rough price range should give you plenty of options in the x86_64 domain - with configuration options as needed.
The Mikrotik RB5009UB is relatively powerful as well, but it's a rather exotic device, with few (albeit enthusiastic) users, x86_64 is a much easier and 'boring' (in the good sense of it) alternative to that. Right now, it's only available in development snapshots (of what will become the next major release, be it 24.x.0 or 25.x.0), as its support has only been finalized a few months ago and didn't make it in time for previous releases.
This aspect doesn't compute, if you are looking for a wired router (regardless of RB5009UB or x86_64), the router is not part of the picture for your wireless infrastructure at all. If you wanted that, you'd have to remain within the Bintec ecosystem - which is going to be difficult, considering that the company went bankrupt and isn't going to honour any future support at all (which also cuts the life cycle of your APs short). There won't be any solution (neither from OpenWrt, nor commercial vendors) to do the management of those Bintec APs.
I didn't find a RB5009UB+S+IN model on the Mikrotik site - are you perhaps referring to RB5009UPr+S+IN ?
Note that there is an outstanding PR for this model https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/15980
I got it. x86-64 seems to be the better way.
But there are a lot of questions.
First of all is there an recomendated rackmountable x86-64 AMD Platform for such a setup with low power consumption and low noise?
Is it a good idea to run openwrt on a opensuse Leap server which is running several other services like nfs, smb, dns, dhcp as a kvm/qemu vm?
How many interfaces do I need? For every vlan tagged network a separate hardware interface?
You are focusing on replacing dead hardware, you understand that server when purchased will not start to manage access points, you need to replace whole wifi controller and AP-s, so openwisp for main server (can be 1G RAM virtual machine), and openwrt access points in corners where you had old ones. Can be 100$ if you have some skill and infra in place.