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? 🌞
Got a “Dell Wyze 5070 extended”, the extended is important because it lets it have a half height PCIe card. Put a dual NIC Intel card in it. It came with 8 GB of RAM and a 64 GB SATA M.2 drive, plenty. Price out a power brick if it doesn’t come with one, which is a Dell laptop one; it refuses to turn on with a PCIe card in and if the power brick is less than 130W (DA130PE1-00 is a product # of it)!! Very annoying. Note the Intel atom processor in it lacks AVX2 instructions which makes mongoDB past v4 not work on it, so you can’t run the Unifi controller, which has vexed me. But it’s fine for internet routing! Never tested throughput but others have online.
(Note: I would not do this now!) I put proxmox on it then did opnsense (passing through the PCIe NICs) and Debian. I chose opnsense over openwrt because opnsense had an automatic update functionality, while openwrt required you to manually wipe the OS and reinstall - when they fix nasty upgrade path that I’ll come knockin. (Openwrt is like that because that’s how routers do upgrades)
I would not choose proxmox now because its upgrade path is fraught since the free level is rolling and they’ve had critical breaking update errors in the past. No good for your router setup. I want upgrades on and automatic so I don’t get kiddie script hacked.
I’m prepping to do either opnsense only and not in a VM or Debian with Incus (VM manager like promox, but not its own OS) installed and then opnsense in a VM. I’m leaning opnsense direct to just make sure my router works, but I’ve never had trouble with Debian yet so still pondering.
I run a pihole and wireguard on the current Debian VM, and opnsense can do wireguard so most of the way there. In the future I’ll switch that pihole instance (wherever it is) to adguardhome, the local rewrite rules in pihole don’t support wildcards so it’s annoying af to have to load in every local domain I set up.
This has worked well for years and I’ve never measured power but I presume it is low.
Hope this infodump helps!
It really did, thank you :) No one else mentioned updating as far as I know, and that wasn’t something I really thought about at all, coming from a commercial router. Plus I just enjoyed your journey. I think I’ll need wireguard to safely access my NAS remotely so that’s good to know too.
Feel free to ask any Qs if any come up, there is ?likely? better value than the Wyze 5070 extended now a days, I looked and bozos still want like $100 for it. Getting AVX2 would be a solid W for software in the future and worth a minor increase in cost. An ARM board (as long as it has UEFI and can boot regular Debian - not a custom distro for the board) would be a solid move too, but you’ll not get Opnsense then - it’s openwrt only for ARM.
This of course is me thinking of pricing when it wasn’t AI bro “lemme order all your RAM on an IOU” stupid, good luck there!! Just opnsense does not need much RAM - like 3 GB is easily safe (mine is given 2GB right now; uses 600 MB right now but I’ve seen it go past 1.5 GB sometimes). Straight Debian will add a gig or so. So even 4 GB would be fine. Proxmox is needy so it’s not fine there, but cutting it out of the equation would make 4 work if you want to save. And you’d prob get away with a $5 16 GB optane M.2 drive from China (aliexpress) with just opnsense - it’s using 3.2 GB of the 16 I’ve given it. And the Optane drive will never wear out as a bonus.
Edit: I’d estimate stock Debian at ~6 GB used. I think both can fit in 16 GB, even with Debian loaded with Incus to run the Opnsense in a VM.