Now that I have time for hobbies again I wanna dive right in to building up a home lab. Right now I just have a Netgear router that reached end of life, and a NAS i’d like to make accessible remotely, and a DIY router seems like the correct next step for me. I’m very interested in ad-blocking network wide and someday I’d like to host my own little webpage, but for now I’m really just barely getting started.
I’m information gathering, I don’t know what I don’t know and my networking skills are pretty weak anyway. But even if your needs and desires have nothing to do with mine, I also just like to hear people talk about their set ups. Please? 🌞


I’m running openWRT on a nanopi R5S. It’s tiny, robust, cheap, and uses very little power. It came with FriendlyElec, a fork of openWRT designed specifically for the device, but if flashed the standard version onto it so I could get more support from reading forums. I don’t know if that was the right move.
It was a bitch to get set up right, but that’s due to my lack of experience, not the device. It didn’t help that there was a major update to OpenWRT/LuCI right in the middle of my figuring out the program, that drastically changed the GUI. It also didn’t help that I was setting up a NAS, and a proxmox server at the same time, so anytime something broke I had 3 system to troubleshoot.
All that aside, it’s been working great since setup with zero maintenance. It does get hot enough that I don’t set it on any other device, but it never throttles itself or overheats.
Lol thanks for that, it’s nice to talk to someone else who also just dove right in instead of the usual online experts who’ve been at it for forever 😅