So on mine, I haven’t bothered to change from the ISP provided router, which is mostly adequate for my needs, except I need to do some DNS shenigans, and so I take over DHCP to specify my DNS server which is beyond the customization provided by the ISP router.
Frankly been thinking of an upgrade because they don’t do NAT loopback and while I currently workaround with different DNS results for local queries, it’s a bit wonky to do that and I’m starting to get WiFi 7 devices and could use an excuse to upgrade to something more in my control.
addie@feddit.uk 1 day ago
The router provided with our internet contract doesn’t allow you to run your own firmware, so we don’t have anything so flexible as what OpenWRT would provide.
Short answer; in order to Pi-hole all of the advertising servers that we’d be connecting to otherwise. Our mobile phones don’t normally allow us to choose a DNS server, but they will use the network-provided one, so it sorts things out for the whole house in one go.
Long, UK answer: because our internet is being messed with by the government at the moment, and I’d prefer to be confident that the DNS look-ups we receive haven’t been altered. That doesn’t fix everything - it’s a VPN job - but little steps.
The DHCP server provided with the router is so very slow in comparison to running our own locally, as well. Websites we use often are cached, but connecting to something new takes several seconds. Nothing as infuriating as slow internet.
demonsword@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Buy another router that allows you to run openwrt and use the locked-down one just as a gateway to the new one, problem solved. My setup is somewhat similar – locked-down cable modem router that I can’t customize, bought a netgear router, installed freshtomato on it
hereiamagain@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Oh you mean DNS server, yes ok that makes sense. Yeah I totally understand running your own.
If I understand correctly, DHCP servers just assign local IPs on initial connection, and configure other stuff like pointing devices to the right DNS server, gateway, etc
addie@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Sorry, putting the two things together, my mistake. My router doesn’t let you specify the DNS server directly, but it does allow you to specify a different DHCP server, which can then hand out new IPs with a different DNS server specified, as you say. Bit of a house of cards. DHCP server in order to be the DNS server too.
hereiamagain@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Gotcha! No worries. Networking gets more and more like sorcery the deeper you go.
Networking and printers are my two least favorite computer things.