RPi 3 setup with LAN, Wifi or both?

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
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1

Hi,

I’m about to reinstall my RPi 3 with Raspbian Jessie and OH2 (not openHABian, manual setup).
The device shall have no monitor and keyboard, however, I want to access the desktop with VNC.
Now I wonder if there are any advantages or disadvantages for communicating with
LAN only,
Wifi only or
both, Wifi and Ethernet connected.

What are your experiances with it?

Thanks in advance

2

I prefer my “server” machines to be LAN. This has far higher reliability in my case.

Any Wifi devices (like mobile handsets, tablets etc) that need to access the server go over a Wifi router anyway.

3

Hi Hakan,

I understand and that’s what I also was thinking about. But does it add a kind of extra reliability to be able to connect to the machine if I also connect it via Wifi to the network?
Or will it probably even cause issues because OH may be designed to communicate through one interface?

4

I am not aware of anything that is designed to be singlehomed. There might be some bindings that have interesting behaviour when multiple interfaces are present, especially when they are waiting for answers on one specific address, but nothing that caused me trouble yet.

I am actively using hue, mqtt, unifi and a few self-written bindings here and there.

As UIs, I have a nginx reverse proxy in front of the PaperUI, basic UI and the REST interface for the native android apps. Everything works pretty wonderfully up till now.

5

That’s cool, thanks!

6

Take Lan. There are so many people with problems using Wifi. I had so often these issues that the credentials were gone, wifi di only connect when I triggered it and so on. I used Lan by Plug(electricity). Now I do have my peace with those conection-issues.
Btw it didnt mater if builtin-wifi or wifi-stick.

7

Thanks White, I think I’m going to connect both, the system should use LAN preferred, right?

8

For me, it depends on where the device is deployed. I don’t have wired networking throughout the house so if the device isn’t in my office I use wireless. I have a repeater so I have good coverage throughout the house and I’ve had no problems.

Of course, I only interact with them over ssh, not VNC. But I have no reason to think VNC would be a problem either.

I don’t know if the reliability gains would be worth the extra work required to make it work. If you have the option for wired just use wired and be done with it. I’ve never had a case where the wired went down and the wifi would have somehow saved me.

The complexity comes from the fact that with both interfaces active your server will appear on your network as two separate machines with two separate IP addresses. Dealing with that, and setting it up in the first place is not worth the effort in my opinion.

9

Hi Rich,

That’s what I did now. I disabled Wifi and just use LAN, in the end it seems to be the best solution.

Thanks guys, I appreciate your answeres.
Cheers

10

Go LAN-only, in my opinion. Wifi adds additional challenges, and it really isn’t (easily) possible to treat WiFi and LAN as redundant interfaces since they will have different IPs. Yes, I know you can do some advanced configuration work to make them appear as once interface in Linux, but do you really want to? It just adds a lot of complexity in troubleshooting you don’t really need.

Besides, how often does a physical NIC, cabling, or switchport fail? In my experience, very rarely.