Do one thing at a time, don't buy equipment unless you have a actionable use case for it.
Isp cpe in bridge mode
One of the boxes can be your gateway
You can keep using the Google Wi-Fi.
You can play around with proxmox, xen, etc, to run a bunch of containers, or virtual machines, to do different things on your network. I think you can do it all with your current hardware
So to start off, I have an active home lab already going with a bunch of services running. I’m looking to strictly de-google my network. Their WAP’s have issues with connectivity and reliability and they are a pain to try and configure, google really locks down what you can do on them.
Unfortunately that software won’t work on my version of google wifi, it’s just a little to new for that.
I am actively looking to replace things and not just make what I have work anymore, wether that’s one peace at a time (just the Google stuff) or the whole networking setup.
Good to know! I’m trying to stay away from Ubiquiti only because of their entry cost would set me back a little over $1000, but I’ll look into Mikrotik and Grandstream as well! Thank you
Depending on your requirements, you can pick up used gear for quite cheap, set alerts on craigslist/marketplace/kijiji. i.e. one access point for like $30 used, and host your own network controller container to configure it.
If you want a single pane of glass whole network management, its going to be spendy no matter which ecosystem you go with.
Would turning one of my optiplexs into a openwrt box and buying some WAP’s be the way to go then? I will need a couple of access points to reach all devices
If you can install a second gigabit NIC into the optiplex it can work very nicely with OPNSense as the main gateway. Then you can connect the LAN side to a simple un-managed switch and branch out to anything further from there.
Edit: OpenWRT is a bit of a pain to manage on x86, so I would try to avoid it for that.