Phantomski
Regular Contributor
It's a bit sad in a way. I like Asus routers, it was always very dependable solution for me and if you saw how much I'm throwing at the poor old AC88U, you'd think I'm crazy. But it just ticks along without breaking a sweat. Well sometimes looking at the temperatures that's maybe a stretch, but it just works.
And I really value and admire all the work that goes into Merlin's FW and all the oddons around it. It just solved so many problems for me over the years. The thing is though - a lot of these problems should not exist in the first place.
These days a lot is different. If you want easy networking, you can buy whole set of UniFi hw and you're set. Yes, even that has limitations, but setting it all up is frankly piece of...easy.
If you want more flexibility, performance, tinkering, control - pfSense runs on almost anything. Yes the GUI might be a little bit dated, but you can quite easily do quite a lot of magic there. I'm one of these people that are intimidated by iptables. Despite of being able to set some basic stuff in there, I'm always anxious I'll break something or allow too much. In pfSense - you can dig deep, but you don't have to. It all kinda makes sense there right away. And you don't even need physical devices to run the show.
Same with the switches and routers - Microtik for example does some really great stuff for quite unbelievable prices - managed sub £100 switches, decent routers for a couple. 10Gbit is almost consumer level these days. PoE everywhere to your heart's content. You want 100Gbit fibre? You've got it. CRS504-4XQ-IN for barely £800. I mean
It quickly comes to a place where you can have pretty decent setup covering all the basis for not much more than a BE98 Pro would cost. Most of it will run for a decade easily. And you can replace bit by bit what you need.
Yep, it's a bit sad really. Progress. If only Asus thrown all the useless gamer stuff out of the window and started concentrating on the real networking
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