Apparently I'm bored or something? Having to actively fight off the urge to buy a Banana Pi R4 with a tri-band Wifi7 adapter and use it as a 2x10G SFP+ AP with #VxLAN/#EVPN directly to the AP.
The core of my home network is 2x Arista 7050 L3 switches, and I want important infrastructure attached to both of them, ideally via 2x10G (or 40G) fiber. I try to avoid L2 links between infrastructure devices as much as possible and use EVPN to layer my L2 WiFi network, etc over the top of L3. This lets me completely avoid spanning tree and all of the performance/scalability issues that come with it. It works amazingly well. It was a pain to set up, but adding new EVPN devices (Linux, Juniper, or Arista) is fairly trivial, and it simplifies a lot of management issues.
Unfortunately, there really aren't any APs the fit this model today. I *think* Arista's top-tier models come close, but they're in the "don't ask" tier of pricing, with per-year, per-AP support costs that are probably more than I'm willing to pay in total for an AP.
The #BPI_R4 (and especially the new #BPI_R4_Pro) seems to be able to run Linux as a WiFi 7 AP, and it's big enough to run FRR (for OSPF, BGP, and EVPN) and probably be fast enough to make WiFi itself the performance bottleneck, not the CPU or wired network.
Big issues:
- It's a dumb idea. I have working WiFi. Leave it alone.
- The BPI R4 is supposed to work with OpenWRT out of the box, except OpenWRT is sort of the antithesis of what I want in a network device. Too much all-in-one, too much GUI, not enough CLI. Also, it doesn't really support OSPF or BGP, much less EVPN.
- It probably *would* be possible with VyOS, except (a) it likely doesn't have the right driver compiled in (b) their hostapd config generator doesn't seem to support multiple SSIDs or WiFi 7 and (c) I doubt they have a build that will boot on the hardware, so I'd probably end up needing an ARM build system just for this.
- Only 1 of my 4 APs today is really in a place where redundant fiber would be easy. 2 more would be fine, except I don't have 2 free strands to either location, so I'd need to pull another 12-strand MTP trunk to each. The final location would just need to be copper.
- I *really* don't need yet another project.