I need to overhaul my home network.

I have a house on a lot that is ~60 meters by ~15 meters. my house is on one side and my garage is on the other, I have a little "studio" building in the middle.

I had relayed the signal around with 4 google/nest wifi mesh things for a decade or so. but I always felt locked out without even a web interface, just the home app. and then two of them died at the same time last month.

I ran some cable last weekend. Now I have 3 roughly equidistant wired switches wired together :House-Studio-Garage.
My current plan is just 3 wireless APs at each. I have a wired only brume 2 that i can use as the router.

I want to be able to have one SSID and roam between them. how well can that work without a mesh type network? just 3 good APs? My phone would stick to one before the mesh network. but that was a long time ago. Im hoping modern protocols might be better?

We have teenage kids, lots of phones and laptops plus wireless home automation devices, shelly switches, wyze cams, smart bulbs, etc.

I'm looking for something open source and as configurable as possible. I'm going in a linuxy direction lately and looking to have more direct access and control of my hardware. That's why I thought to ask here.

Claude and co have recommended:

Zyxel NWA50AXPRO
Cudy AP3000
Omada EAP670

After I pick an AP I also need to pick a switch. I used the old 3 switches I already had on hand: TRENDnet TEG-S82g, Netgear GS105, Netgear FS108. All 3 are unmanaged and one is 10/100. so I want to replace at least the slow one. I'm thinking of getting a managed switch with POE for the switch that connects to the router. I want to try running POE cameras at some point. I want to be able to make a plex server, NAS, etc. Again, I want something flexible and I don't mind fiddling with it or paying a little more for decent hardware. I'm considering the Zyxel GS1900-8HP.

Both the Zyxels apear to be openWRT compatable. which is something I may want to try.

I generally don't keep up with this stuff. I've never went very deep into networking before. I wanted to check with some real people. Has anyone used any of these, or any other good wireless APs? Is there another strategy that would work better for my setup?

Thanks for reading!

I will soon have a home and figured now's the time to do a proper home server, especially since it's going to come with cat 6 run from the main panel to just about every room. I code for a living, but at the same time network is a massive gap in my knowledge, as are servers, and I was hoping to use this as a learning moment as well as just a way to optimize things. I've been doing research for a few weeks now on and off and feel like I've got more questions than I started with, so I'll just vomit them out and if anyone has some guidance I'd really appreciate it.

Some information:

1. I'm willing/able to spend to get quality/simplicity. Time is the much bigger crunch for me right now, and I'd much rather buy something that works even if it costs more than cobbling together some deals.

2. Related to 1, I'd like this to not become my fulltime second job/hobby. I will at some point try to expand to a full home lab, and do want to use this to learn about things I feel I should understand better for general knowledge and my career, but i'd love for core functionality to mostly "just work" after configuring so when I don't have time to do that I'm not stuck telling everyone "oh yeah it'll be broken until I find time to fix it".

Things I know I want-

1. Some sort of NAS. From my research Synology comes up a lot as the "it's expensive but it'll just work" option, and I probably want something like a 4 bay of NAS specific several TB HDD's in something like raid 5/6/10. Pricey as hell but I'm most willing to spend on this as the cost might very well be split by the family members who want me to guinea pig all this.

2. I will have a camera system and would prefer to not have it sending data outside my network. This is the area i've looked at the least, as it's a little farther down the road, but I know others who have things like Arlo and lets just say i'm not super impressed. Obviously this brings up question like remote access to said camera's and where I'm storing the data (nas? Somewhere else?)

3. I'd like to mess with a media server. Plex/Jellyfin constantly come up in my research, so I'll be looking into those, but I've also got a bunch of audiobooks that I'd love to be able to easily share, and I think there's software for that stuff as well.

4. Pihole strikes me as the other "well if you're going to do this, you might as well" option that i'm aware of. Realllly need to better understand networking in general, but I hear these days it can kinda be installed and quickly configured and then left to do its job.

5. Related to all of this, Casa OS keeps coming up as a very good tool for a beginner like me, since it streamlines the handling of docker containers and also file sharing. However it's not really an OS, since it must actually run on Debian (i think?) for now (zima OS still in testing?).

Stuff I'd like to mess with but doesn't have to happen right away.

1. Eventually the aforementioned NAS would be backed up offsite to another NAS at another family members house, once I know what the hell I'm doing.

2. Proxmox constantly comes up as THE tool to use, but it leaves a lot of questions for me. Obviously if I start trying to do lab environments and screw with VM's it's going to be great, but my understanding is that I probably don't, as a beginner, want to say load up a device with proxmox and then have it host debian which installs CasaOS as it'll get a little more tricky to have everything talk right? Unsure on this part.

3. Anything else I'm forgetting. One issue I keep having with this is a LOT of the information out there is either too complex for me to really grok or just says "well yeah you could do ANYTHING with this" and it just sorta assumes I know what the options are. If there's anything else worth checking out I'd love to know.

Hardware I've come across-

1. Synology - Already mentioned but seems like they're a common go to for a "more money than skill/time" situation like mine.

2. Zimaboard - My understanding is it's underpowered for its price, but the main draws are that it's VERY low power, small, and quiet. What it could actually do from my list above is where i'm unsure. I see people are supposedly using it for Plex servers and what not, and I'm pretty sure it's not going to make any kick ass lab environments, but being quiet, small, and maybe a bit closer to plug and play seems tempting (I know they make the blade and a few other products but it all seems greek to me).

3. Various mini computers - I've got a minisforum machine from several years ago that I currently use as a living room computer for light gaming and mostly playing movies and the like. Not sure if i could just wipe it and convert it to be the starting point (more on that later). I know used 1 liter mini pc's from companies like HP are also popular.

4. The MS-01 - Similar pile as the last one but my understanding is this is the kind of thing that's probably really cool if you actually know what the hell you're doing. I'm 99% positive it is vast overkill for my purposes, but I'd like to eventually get to the point where I could understand why I might want something like this. My understanding is if I knew what I was doing I could probably drop proxmox on this and do everything I could ever want and more, but I feel quite far from that.

Some general questions I have -

1. The thing that kicked this all off is my new place likely having fiber, and cat 6 drops throughout the building. Architecture is something I'm still a little shaky on. I assume i'm going to need my own modem/router (just because the cox routers are meh and not really configurable from last I checked), and then that routes to the server first???...or something(seems like a must if you want the pihole to do anything)? I've seen lots of niffty network diagrams at this point but they're all from people WAAAAAAAAY beyond my skill level doing much more ambitious stuff, so it gets hard to understand. If anyone has a simple home network diagram/guide to look at I'd really appreciate it.

2. I'm just in general going to need to learn more about networking, especially in a home environment. Should I eventually get those camera's set up, I want to understand how to let them talk to internal storage and what not ,but not get out to the web...or..something (again remote access seems nice, but also like a massive security concern). I know speed is also a big factor i'm going to need to better understand. Having a fiber connection in only to be bottle necked by a crappy router or a 1gigabit port is just a waste of money, so that's something else I'd like to better understand.

3. I'm a little unclear on how to deliver the media in a media server to the various screens throughout the building. I've got cat 6 to all of them, but I suspect i'm still going to need, at the very least, a cheap computer to hook up to it and then display the image to the monitor/TV? This is why I assume I can't just wipe my current mini PC and reuse it as a server, because I still need it to receive the data from the home server (or at least a web browser?). A part of me feels like if I got a powerful enough server it should be able to server the media direction to the screen, but then you'd need some sort of HDMI/DP drops as well from the server to all your screens?...or something?

Sorry for all the rambling but I've got an odd mix of knowledge and ignorance so it's been a little difficult to research when half the video is stuff I already get, and the other half blows past me or just assumes I know about the parts i'm trying desperately to learn about.

I'm sharing in case some of you are having a similar issue at work or at home, and to hear your opinion and/or similar stories!

I've been using Ubiquiti access points in my home for a few years now, and overall, they've worked very well. 3 APs giving near perfect 5GHz VHT80 coverage on DFS channels. LAN transfers are about 600-650mbit on laptops, which has proven to be plenty for wireless clients in my home. Keep in mind that this is a pretty basic setup... besides the APs, there's just the ISP provided GPON ONT which is also a typical all-in-one ISP solution (router, switch, AP, firewall, DHCP server...) with it's Wi-Fi turned off.

As I said, I was pretty happy with the results, however there was one feature that I could never get to work just right; roaming. You could be walking around the house watching a live stream and the stream would pause for 5-8 seconds until the roaming transition was over. Strangely, with VoIP calls, roaming would be about 3-5 seconds. Even enabling fast roaming features (which I believe is simply 802.11r) on the AP's controller would not give the results I was looking for. After days of tweaking TX power settings, channel selection and trying to implement Minimum RSSI (which I ended up not using), I finally gave up and resigned myself to the 4-6 seconds (oh, the humanity) of roaming time.

Fast forward to about two months ago and I added a new router to the setup (UBNT ER-4) and a switch (UBNT USW-24). Setup went smooth, already had some cat.6 cabling around the house, now it was time to actually use it. Had some fun setting up a guest Wi-Fi network on it's own VLAN, which was always a concern of mine; having "untrusted" devices connect to my network. The access points do client isolation on guest networks by default, but in my mind it wasn't enough as I have some file servers and time machines on the network.

Anyways, a few days after doing the setup I'm walking around the house with a livestream on my mobile and suddenly realize that it's not losing the connection. I try with a VoIP call and it worked flawlessly. I start walking around faster and still, the phone is roaming without an issue. I was very excited!

I'm thinking it must be the router that somehow solved the roaming issue. My first theory was that the DHCP server on the ER-4 was doing it's thing much faster than the ISP's device, allowing the wireless clients to actually roam faster. So I do a web search and I find some very relevant info. It was a thread on a forum and reddit thread with a sysadmin that was about to give up on the APs because of roaming issues. In both threads, there were replies about what switch were they using.

Apparently, some switches (Cisco and HP were mentioned), have a "MAC aging" interval setting which is way too high by default, or they simply have bugged firmware that doesn't allow the switch to "re-learn" the MAC address of a device on a different switch port. I assume that ISP provided "el-cheapo" gear has similar issues.

So, if you're having roaming issues with your wireless clients, check your switches!!!

Anyways, just wanted to share this story. Thank you for reading. :-)