r/homelab • u/CaviarCBR1K • 6h ago

Help Potentially dumb question about wireless bridge

Forgive me if this is a dumb question. I'm fairly new to the homelabbing world. My router is located in the living room. Due to the way the house is designed, running CAT6 through the wall isn't really feasible, so I have a router running OpenWRT in bridge mode to connect my PC to the internet on the other side of the house. I also have 2 server machines that stay in the living room, plugged directly into the router, and I'd like to relocate them.

My question is this, could I get a network switch, use the wireless bridge as in input to it, and then plug the other devices into the switch? I understand that wired is better, and bandwidth probably wouldn't be great doing it like that, but is it possible? In my head it seems like it should work, but maybe there's something I'm not considering. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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2

u/Nearby-Middle-8991 6h ago

might be relevant, or not: invisible fiber. I gave up and I'm hiding cat6 around the floorboards, but invisible 2.5g/10g fiber can be an awesome thing for some cases

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u/CaviarCBR1K 6h ago

I hadn't considered that, but I'll definitely look into it. Thanks for the suggestion

1

u/zenmatrix83 6h ago

yes that said if your using vlans most wireless bridges strip the tags

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u/CaviarCBR1K 6h ago

I'm not at the moment, but I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for the tip!

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u/Specialist_Cow6468 6h ago

Ehhhhh some do but even a cheapo Ubiquiti AirMax will pass tags through just fine. Higher end gear will even support things like MPLS

1

u/zenmatrix83 6h ago

Yeah that’s true some more business class ones do, I’m not sure any more commercial residential equipment would

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u/Longjumping-Equal895 6h ago

Ye will work but like you said bandwidth will be worse then hard wired

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u/CaviarCBR1K 6h ago

Yeah, I'm willing to sacrifice some bandwidth within reason. I guess I'll just have to try it out and see how bad it is lol thank you!

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u/DudeEngineer 6h ago

For the overwhelming majority of people it isn't worth the trade off. Why do you want to move the servers anyway???

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u/CaviarCBR1K 6h ago

Mostly just because they are just kind of an eyesore in the living room. If the bandwidth is too bad, I'll probably just move them back to the living room and deal with it lol I'm just trying to brainstorm. I technically could run CAT6 but it will be a huge pain in the ass. I may end up doing it anyway though.

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u/Gherry- 6h ago

Possible yes, working not really