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? 🌞
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I have OPNsense running on a 2nd-hand Dell Optiplex SFF, which I added 2-port NIC(s) to (initially Gigabit RJ45, then later 10Gbit SFP).
Currently it’s running bridged from my ISP router, but I’m in the process of wiring the fibre directly via a SFP transceiver to the NIC. I believe you can do adblocking on OPNsense itself via Unbound, but I prefer to do that via a separate PiHole (VM).
I used to run openwrt on a Xeon blade in my old C6100. It worked well enough but was a waste. Now it’s just a stock ER605 without the Omada controller.
I ran a linux box with two gigabit Intel NICs for years with iptables. Almost any device can do it.
Like others say, opnsense is prob your best bet unless you like the abstraction of iptables
I don’t know for sure what I like or don’t like, but I am pretty sure I do not want to start with iptables. Thank you :)
I was using an N100 based mini PC and it did fine at 1gbit. But now that I have 3, and it’s realistically closer to 4 or 5 it doesn’t cut the mustard.
Proper hardware based routers are also just so much more efficient. That N100 machine was constantly hot to the touch. My new UniFi router uses less power and does 10 gig easily.
Can I ask what the 10 gig is for?
I usually just use proper network devices. OpenWRT will general run on anything with Mediatec or Qualcomm based assuming it has support
Router is a bunch of old PCs I frankensteined and put opnsense on.
Ended up i5-7500, 8gb mem, 500gb SSD.
Put in a dual-port SFP+ NIC and a dual port 2.5GbaseT nic.
One of the 2.5gb ports goes to my cable modem.
One of the 10gb ports takes Twinax to my dumb LAN switch, the other to my dumb server switch, which right now is really just my storage network…the link to the firewall isn’t doing anyt
uhing.The dumb switches I have here, though, they’ve got some sort of weird MAC learning disability. It cannot handle macflaps, which I found out about because I had a hard time roaming between APs.
So I got a Netgear GS108T and put OpenWRT on it, and that switches between my APs.
My APs are Linksys MX4200v1’s. Also openwrt. Got four of them…one upstairs, two in the ground floor, one in the basement. Can get very close to 1Gbps anywhere in the house on wifi. Not the best platform for openwrt (ipq807x), as I’ve found out…but it was a hella cheap deal for tri-band AX APs.
I don’t think this is what I’m gonna end up doing, but I LOVE STORIES LIKE THIS. Frankensteining a bunch of shit together just makes me feel so nostalgic for how I got into PCs in the first place. MAC learning disability also made me laugh.
It’s currently a N100 mini-pc running Debian, but in the past it’s been all kinds of random hardware including a busted old laptop with an expresscard-PCIe riser for the second NIC. Anything can be a router if you know what you’re doing!
thank you, this is a great post! I like your blog!
i had a cheap made in china consumer router with mt7621 on it, porting openwrt was surprisingly easy and its been running well enough for the past 5 years. adguard home runs on it and handles dns adblocking
someone else suggested openwrt on my current EOL router, i might just try that! like, i think eventually I might still want something more robust, but it sounds like a pretty good starting point
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.
When I retire my desktop PC, the old parts become my router. If you have two network ports, it can do it.
To warrant the power bill, it’s also a NAS, NVR, mail server, print server and web server.
All my Wifi APs are various home routers flashed with OpenWRT.
Running an email server sounds super super difficult
I’ve been running mine for over 20 years. It’s certainly got more difficult, especially to be able to reliably communicate with Gmail-hosted servers and outlook.com addresses, but SPF, DMARC, and DKIM are all pretty straightforward to set up. Tightening the encryption/hash algorithms you accept and “anonymizing” your server greetings takes some finesse as well, but I definitely prefer it this way.
I avoid the entire webmail and spam filtering aspects, smtp(s) and imap(s) only.
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 😅
Opnsense on whatever. Plus pihole for DNS/adblock.
I put Opnsense on an Intel Pentium G3220 and it’s been rock solid for gigabit.
I’m running pfSense on an old Intel Atom fanless mini PC with 6 ethernet ports. I use pfBlocker for ad blocking. I also installed a GPS module in it. That’s the clock source for the NTP server. I was planning on replacing it with something newer, but that’s not happening until memory prices come down.
I would not recommend using pfSense anymore. My next router will be running OPNsense. I will probably install Adguard Home on that for ad blocking.
Why wouldn’t you recommend pfsense anymore? Also what’s an NTS server for?
There are a number of issues with pfSense. The updates for the community edition are slow. They are trying to push everyone to the paid version. You can’t even download an ISO to install it offline anymore. You have to make a Netgate account to download an installer that needs an internet connection to run.
NTP is network time protocol. It’s used to get the time over the network. Using a GPS receiver as the clock source makes it more accurate and allows it to work without an internet connection.
Ooooo that’s really good to know. See, I think starting my journey on youtube, I was kind of getting some slightly biased perspectives, like, a lot more exposure to firms that are more likely to do youtube sponsorships, for example.
Thank you!
I just put OpenWRT on a (at this point quite old) TP-Link non-DIY home router. The only thing wrong with it is that it isn’t a rack-mountable rectangle, which offends my perfectionism.
I don’t care if TP-Link thinks it’s EOL as long as OpenWRT doesn’t. You should check the supported devices list for your current hardware.
Oh that’s something I hadn’t thought about at all! Hmmm
I bought a firewall appliance based on an Intel CPU, with 4x 2.5gbps Ethernet ports, 8gb ram. Installed opnSense on it and been super happy even since!
A bit pricey the hardware, but it’s been totally rock solid for almost two years now.
I have configured unbound with ad blocking on opnSense, and it has every single option I would ever want on it. Amazing stuff.
I’m eyeing a similar one, but with 2x sfp+ ports too.
I’ve seen a lot of people on YouTube talking about this or that cast off networking device that they turned into a router. I do find the idea of repurposing especially old tech appealing. Or did you buy it brand new?
