After a hardware upgrade I ended up with a spare mini pc. Noticed these two icons and thought I might be able to use it as a WiFi access point with VLANs using OPNsense.
Is that possible? If so, what do I even need to buy to plug into there?
I don’t need it to do any fancy dhcp, dns or firewall stuff, I just need a WiFi access point with support for VLANs.
It is possible but not recommended. The hardware is designed to world as a client so it is likely missing a lot of modern features. You can but the quality of the signal will suck. It might be fine as a temporary solution for a single device but that’s it.
Exactly. A DIY router is fine, don’t DIY the AP.
You can absolutely “DIY” the AP. You just need the right hardware. Take something that has good wifi hardware and flash OpenWRT.
Before you start with this project, consider the power use of a full X86 system even at idle and compare that to a standard router.
If you are looking to run this as an access point permanently, the cost of power may add up.
I am not saying that you shouldn’t do it, but take it into account before deciding.
The architecture doesn’t determine the power draw so much as the system design. I’ve got a Chromebox running an i3 and sipping 4.5w at idle.
That’s a good point, I’ll see if I can figure out the power draw of this system somehow. Any tips?
These are probably just rubber nubs where you could install wifi antennas. You would still need to buy the antennas and a pcie m2 wifi addon card.
opnSense and WiFi don’t play too well due to limited BSD WiFi support.
OpenWRT is a much better choice for an AP.
At least make sure the WiFi on the minipc is supported by opnSense before attempting that…
I don’t mind which software, I could absolutely use openwrt instead. Assuming I do, which hardware might I need?
I only used OpenWRT on netgear (arm) hardware… So for x86 I have no idea, but they have great forums you can lurk or inquire…
It should support all WiFi chipsets supported by Linux.
You’d probably be a lot better off buying a decent access point (unifi, mikrotik, Aruba instanton).
yes do it.
depending on what you get for a wifi card, you might want to virtualize some flavor of linux like openwrt to run the wifi.
bsd (opnsense, pfsense) is notoriously bad for wifi support.
the biggest challenge here is selecting the right wifi hardware imo.
I’ve done this before on Ubuntu. You can install nftables for routing, then install hostapd for a wifi AP.
Sounds like a pain to configure compared to some of the more designated systems. Is the advantage that you use Ubuntu for other things as well, so it’s a more multifunctional system?
That’s basically it. My Ubuntu server is a router, NAS, plex server, public statum-1 NTP server, wordpress server, nextcloud server, security camera NVR, SMTP/IMAP mail server, CUPS print server, tor relay, and probably a few other things I forgot about.
You can do a lot with a single CPU from 2015.
I don’t have hostapd on it anymore. I now have dedicated APs on OpenWRT. The main problem with using a WNIC for an AP is that they don’t typically have a very strong broadcast output. I had to add an amplifier, and even then it wasn’t great.
Install fresh tomato to this and you’ll get a much better AP with very good firewall and QOS and traffic inspection. Also good SNMP for monitoring
Freshtomato is very out of date. I would highly recommend against it.
Freshtomato is not out of date. The last stable release was december of 2024 And the github repos are being actively updated as well.
Perhaps you are confusing freshtomato with some of it’s predecessors, like tomato or advancedtomato, which are no longer currently maintained.
As for openwrt instead, that doesn’t support broadcom wifi chips, whereas freshtomato does.
What’s the kernel version? Last I heard they were shipping an ancient kernel that was EOL.
