Wi-Fi on TrueNAS Scale?

[Constantin]

so provided your office is small enought in might actually be beneficial to have direct access via wifi. especially given the fact that for example wifi 6e will be able to out pace (or at least come verry close to) wired gbit ports...

As a avid user of 6E, my life experience is different. For me, dedicated Gigabit wired will outpace 6E (even at @ 6GHz) in most real-life situations almost all of the time. Short of sitting in the line of sight, with zero interference, single-user case, etc. wireless systems struggle to achieve anything close to their nameplate performance.

For one, WiFi systems have to distribute their bandwidth across all users whereas a wired connection may dedicate all its bandwidth to just one user, with minimal latency. Secondly, that gigabit connection can feed into a good switch from which high-volume data can move on in larger 10GbE+ trunks. By contrast, many WiFi systems now advocate for meshing, which is great for retrofit applications in older homes but a stinker from the point of view of flooding the airwaves with packets.

Where I can, I offload everything to wired / optical and only allow that to be wireless that has to be - for performance reasons. Minimize the strain on the wireless to maximize its availability / bandwidth for the users that must use wireless.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

If a person uses TrueNAS for reliability it makes sense the network is also reliable, secure, and available. WiFi is a convenience, not a foundation.

Said differently, if you need a horse you don't raise zebras.

 

[Davvo]

if you need a horse you don't raise zebras.

Both are great meat though.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Both are great meat though.

That's true; just because you have rats that doesn't mean you want to eat them.

Said differently: Just because you have a Realtek controller that doesn't mean you want to use it.

 

[NickF]

TrueNAS SCALE is a hypervisor. If you want WiFi on your TrueNAS box, build a VM to do it for you.

OpenWRT, as an example:

[OpenWrt Wiki] Bridged AP

openwrt.org

SCALE is a datacenter in a box. Just because the feature you are looking for does not natively exist, doesn't mean you can't do it.

Resource - TrueNAS SCALE: A “Datacenter-in-a-box"

As a pre-requisite, consider reading my TrueNAS SCALE virtualization guide! https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/getting-started-with-virtualization-on-truenas-scale.214/ This resource is meant to be a series. Part 1 will cover both the...

www.truenas.com

The only variation on the above resource is to add a WiFi card instead of an HBA as a passthru device to you VM. So If you really want it that bad, you should do it and then share with the fine folks here.

 

[ULTIoNT]

I guess using it in a VM is fine, but why though.

It's a personal use case. I would like to use the computer as a router besides being a NAS, hence installing things like OpenWRT in a VM. I have an ethernet connection with 300Mbps downloading and 20Mbps uploading bandwidth while the apartment complex provides a 100Mbps bandwidth for both downloads and uploads for each apartment via Wi-Fi. So I want to load balance between these 2 connections so I can move some less important traffic to the Wi-Fi, use the Wi-Fi for upload-intensive tasks, etc. For example to stream media or the entire screen of a LAN device when I am away from home, I would prefer to use that Wi-Fi connection and forward it's port to a VPS to get a publicly accessible IP. Currently I am doing this on each of the devices by setting a routing rule to choose Wi-Fi over ethernet when connecting to the IP of the VPS and I am thinking of relying on the router to do all this instead.

 

[elvisimprsntr]

I think a better typical new TrueNAS user analogy is:

I want a shinny new Ferrari, but it must cost next to nothing to purchase, insure, operate, and maintain.

You want wireless, here ya go!

 

[badguy]

I think a better typical new TrueNAS user analogy is:

I want a shinny new Ferrari, but it must cost next to nothing to purchase, insure, operate, and maintain.

You want wireless, here ya go!



View attachment 68388

An even better analogy: I want to drive an electric car, but I want to charge it from a regular home outlet, because I drive a little and can afford to wait. and I am not comfortable going to a charging station. but I am offered an option that only supports fast public charge stations in a shopping mall, without any possibility of using a home outlet.

 

[Ericloewe]

If we want the car analogy, I'd say Wi-Fi is a solar panel roof. It's useful to only a very narrow section of users because of how puny it is, but has real costs to support. For most users, it would be a net negative in terms of cost and weight.

 

[Davvo]

You can charge your car by plugging it in your regular home outlet; you just cannot recharge the EV wirelessly.

 

[badguy]

If we want the car analogy, I'd say Wi-Fi is a solar panel roof.

a solar panel on the roof of a normal car is not enough for the car to drive, but enough for it to be able, for example, to turn on the ventilation system in the cabin on a hot day without any damage to the battery.
but at the same time today wifi is enough for home use with a home miniserver. about industrial use - I agree that it is an inappropriate connection. but in a modern home, where now almost 100% of devices use wireless connection - idk.

You can charge your car by plugging it in your regular home outlet; you just cannot recharge the EV wirelessly.

But at the same time it is possible to charge from a battery that was previously charged from a home outlet. it looks silly, as it requires the user to buy an extra device and then use the wireless network anyway.

 

[Davvo]

You can't, nor you would want to, charge an EV battery wirelessly. The EV then might even be able to charge your phone wirelessly, but it's not the battery itself.

In the analogy the battery is the NAS and the EV is your home network.

You can use wireless to transfer files to and from your NAS by cabling it to your router/AP.

 

[Ericloewe]

Cost vs. benefit. That is all. Too little benefit for too much cost. Don't expect the devs to change their opinion on this topic.

 

[Whattteva]

You can't, nor you would want to, charge an EV battery wirelessly.

Last I checked, the best wireless charging (Qi2) is around 85-90% efficiency. That's quite good for low power devices like phones, but fairly significant for an EV. Actually, I'd say even for phones, that extra 10-15% would be pretty significant when you scale that up to a whole city. Not everyone owns an EV, but pretty much everyone owns a phone.

 

[Constantin]

Last I checked, the best wireless charging (Qi2) is around 85-90% efficiency. That's quite good for low power devices like phones, but fairly significant for an EV. Actually, I'd say even for phones, that extra 10-15% would be pretty significant when you scale that up to a whole city. Not everyone owns an EV, but pretty much everyone owns a phone.

At scale, every bit counts, it's why energy efficiency regulations keep reducing the energy footprint of appliances and equipment across the US. Half of the Paris climate accord was driven by appliance standards (granted, the bulk of that savings will be in the space conditioning domain).

But the same logic drove the adoption of switchmode power supplies and pretty much eliminated VFDs from microwave ovens as the clock display on a average microwave consumed about 1/3 of the total annual power. No doubt, the efficiency of Qi chargers will likely have to increase with time also.