Trying to catch up here ..... the page count is rolling by almost faster than I can keep up.
I find I do not bother posting since the context to my post would be 15 or 20 pages in the past!
@Zucca, congratulations on a great bike ride. Brings back memories, since I drove through those areas when I was doing cross country ski races. That, and I used to be able to do rides like that. I SHOULD still be able to, but out of shape due to getting married, having a kid and numerous furry pets. Canada is great for that sort of thing, except dealing with the car drivers in southern Ontario & Quebec.
Not only are kids bad for keeping in shape, but that's my excuse for no longer having a calculator. All calculators in the house have been stolen by the primary school kid and are hoarded away somewhere unknown to me. Yes, I use a calculator app on the phone and computer these days. I protest that TEA group calculator qualification!
@Saskia, good to hear that your hubby is doing much better. I know that optics are a tempting rabbit-hole. My optics are
limited to a couple of Nikon M2 and a D90, which does leave a bit of funds left over for TEA.
@mnem, best wishes on your upcoming move. I posted something in your ISP thread for you.
No one probably remembers, but I had what I thought was a problem with my pi-hole back in June. Then I went through a bunch of silly events during troubleshooting.
Well, I know what the actual problem is now, and got a workaround. The pi-hole never was the problem at all. It turns out Bell did an upgrade on the DSL modem/router, which did not complete properly and fuckerized (I rarely use such strong language, but it fits here) my home network.
They eventually sent another modem/router, which then also got the same upgrade. At least the upgrade did not fail on the second modem. That worked well enough that SWMBO and I could use our work computers and the kid could get Netflix on a tablet. Vacation time put a delay on that and I finally got back to it. The past week or so I have been trying to get things working properly during hours when everyone else is asleep and not needing internet. It turns out the Bell upgrade added support for IPv6, or rather it introduced a significant bug. The IPv6 does not actually work. It messed up DHCP such that IPv6 compatible devices were given the same IP as IPv4-only devices. That is not all either. The settings to allow the pi-hole take over DHCP are no longer available. For WiFi, the 2.4GHz and 5GHz are fixed with the same SSID (does not work for some of my older 2.4GHz only IoT toys). There is no longer any setting for the 20 or 40 kHz bandwidth of the 2.4GHz WiFi. And so on and so on with other minor things
So, my conclusion is my only choice is to isolate the Bell device and use it ONLY as a modem, with all the crap features disabled as much as possible and unused for the rest.
Any recommendations on a router with WiFi and Ethernet for North America use?The modem speed is only about 1.5 Mbps even though I am paying for a 5 Mbps plan. Hopefully, that might be improved in the future, but all bets are off (there is really no choice here on ISP or service level).
Devices in the house are wired as much as possible, using cat6 cable, so gigabit ethernet on at least 4 ports is required.
There are a couple of unmanaged switches to add devices depending on location.
The WiFi should be fully configurable (ie. the gandwidth, power level, channels), including the ability to use different SSID for 2.4 & 5 GHz.
WiFi should support a couple of VPNs running videoconference plus a device with netflix simultaneously (in theory that will be the maximum load).
Edit: If I want to configure vLAN, do I need to choose an appropriate device for that. I recall recommendations here to put the electronics lab isolated from the rest of the network; probably a good thing to do again with devices that belong to work.