Submitted 1 year ago by flashgnash@lemm.ee to selfhosted@lemmy.world
Was rather shocked to find BT hubs don’t allow you to change DNS servers anymore and force you to use their own ones, so I can’t properly setup pihole.
What routers are people using now that are reliable and will let me control my own network configuration
What I did is I bought a cheap small PC with an Intel chip (i5), some RAM and an SSD. You can find these with more than one NIC pretty easily from Amazon, and they are just normal computers: only small and quiet. Then go with a virtualization platform such as Proxmox, and to that, install opnSense as the router distribution and use the rest of the processing power to run everything else in your house in virtual machines: Home Assistant, media server, you name it… Just search Amazon with something like “router pc” and you get a long list of machines below and over 200 euros that are more than enough for your home. Computers like this one.
The great thing about opnSense is how it gets regular updates. And when you use a normal PC as your router, you run the latest FreeBSD kernel and get updates basically as long as opnSense is developed.
You probably also want a Wi-Fi. These boxes usually miss it, and even when they have a Wi-Fi card, opnSense is not really great for setting wireless networks. I just bought a few APs from Ubiquiti. They are a bit on the expensive side, but I just don’t need to touch these things after setting them up and the network never fails on me. There are also much cheaper APs in the market, just get anything that fits to your budget and plug it to the router.
Surprised to see no mention of the Edgerouter X in this thread so far.
Honestly, if you’re looking for a simple, highly customizable router that comes with its own hardware, and don’t mind supplying a separate access point, you really can do a lot worse than the ERX. They’re small, highly affordable, use very little power, and it’s all just Debian under the hood so you can do an astonishing amount with them.
Yeah this is what I’ve been running for the last few years. Incredibly stable and does everything that you want for a small network. Even has poe passthrough if your AP supports that
I have been using this for years and cannot recommend it enough. It’s literally the perfect home router in my opinion. Highly customizable, affordable, small, no gimped features “for ease of use” or whatever bs and extremely stable - I have never once had to touch it or reboot it after setting it up, which is more than I can say for any other router. The only downside is that you do have supply an AP separately.
It’s a great little machine. The downside, though, is that it’s not that powerful at all. With hardware offload enabled and features like QoS turned off, you’ll get about ~600mbps of max total bandwidth shared between up/down.
For most people that shouldn’t be an issue, though.
Can confirm - I am on an edgerouter x for years now - you can do anything you want with it. It’s not casual friendly.
Surprised that no one has mentioned the Fresh Tomato project
There’s a ton of functionality built into it, and it is regularly updated.
Opnsense or openwrt devices.
This is the way. Love OPNsense!
Literally anything that’s not ISP provided should give you the flexibility to set your own network parameters, but if you want strong flexibility beyond that, I’m going to throw my recommendation to opnSense, it’s a fork of pfSense and the only reason I like it over pfSense is that the interface is very different and to me, it makes a lot more sense in how it’s laid out.
That’s personal preference, YMMV.
For consumer gear, ubiquiti has some strong units, the ER-X is pretty reasonable, but the unifi line is somewhat more beginner friendly, but tends to bury advanced features a little bit, focusing more on usage and reporting of activity and such.
Lower end consumer, the usual contenders are tp-link, and Netgear, though I lean more towards stuff from Asus, or anything on the dd-wrt compatibility lists… I ran a Linksys WRT54GL for a long time because of dd-wrt. I haven’t kept up with the “wrt” variants over time… The last time I touched dd-wrt was on a relatively high end (at the time) Asus router and it did very well… Might be work looking into. There’s usually a trick to getting wrt firmware into a router though, and it will likely void your warranty, so buyer beware.
Circling back… My biggest issue with opnSense and pfSense, is the choice of hardware, unless you’re buying direct from pfSense’s netgate product line, you’ll have to source something to run it on, and my biggest issue with that, personally, is that I want something small, like a router, IMO, should be, at least smaller than most PC’s, that’s relatively inexpensive, with at least two built in ethernet ports, since I’ve found that USB ethernet options are generally not very reliable. And usually, I can find something small and cheap, but there’s only one ethernet port, or I can find something cheap with plenty of networking, but it’s not small, or I can find something small with plenty of networking, but it’s not cheap.
So I’m running a sonicwall at home, because fuck all this other junk, I just want something that does what I want it to do without hiding all my options behind some garbage, or a system that can only work a particular way, and you don’t get options to change it. Or something that’s huge or expensive… Or something I have to spend a lot of time setting up, maintaining, or fixing. For me, that’s sonicwall.
I opted for a Fujitsu Futro S720. It has only 1 Ethernet, but you can add a second one with a PCI x4 card. Used are very cheap and consumes about 6W (if I’m not mistaken).
This is also similar reasoning and why I went with a mikrotik router. All the functionality I need, none of the bullshit, solid performance for price. Only downside is the setup isn’t trivial, but if you’re comfortable on the command line, it’s a breeze.
If you don’t want to go the route with building your own hardware there is also mikrotik with which I’m pretty happy. Something like the hex s is pretty cheap and has an sfp port if you have fiber.
I run OpenWRT on a RaspberryPi and it’s great. Happy to answer questions.
Where did you attach the second ethernet NIC?
I used USB Ethernet adapters in both USB ports. TP-Link UE300, been rock solid.
MikroTik is super powerful, customizable and affordable.
That’s depend on how deep you want to go with router customization. Most casual enthusiasts would do fine using an Asus router. Out of the box, the firmware is based on an opensource firmware (Tomato) and has a lot of features and options compared to their competitors. Feature-wise, it already blows other cunsomer-grade routers out of water. And because the firmware’s source is available, third-party firmware (asuswrt-merlin) is thriving and can be flashed with zero risk while adding a whole bunch of new features and customization options.
If you want something more, then your only options are using enterprise-grade routers (e.g. mikrotik, ubiquity, etc). Just note that these enterprise gears usually don’t have latest WiFi tech (or even WiFi at all!), so you’ll still need to buy another wifi access point and hook them downsteam of the router.
If you have a pi kicking around or a docker instance of pihole you can use it to take over dhcp of the router and then set the dns servers in pihole.
That’s what I do currently on my home hub
That might be the way to do it. I’m somewhat unfamiliar with networking, what does DHCP do?
DHCP strands for dynamic host control protocol. It is a server that assigns dynamic IP addresses to devices on the network which request it.
Lots of good suggestions. The down side to a pc running nonsense is going to be electricity costs. If that’s a concern.
Any of the Asus routers supported by Merlin will do what you need. (That’s what I’m currently doing). It has a feature called DNS control that will intercept DNS lookups and send them to the servers you define.
There are mini pcs running atom or celeron with impressive specs and Gbit capability that use <15w
Yeah that’s actually a long term goal of mine. Get one of those soc boxes with 4 eth ports designed to be a pf/opnsense box.
I use pfsense on my own metal. I can recommend it- never caused me any issues in the 4 years I’ve been using it, now. Even seamlessly updated major version twice.
I use Protectli hardware with Pfsense or Opnsense. Doing this at home and in 10+ small/medium environments. Never had any issues, I highly recommend Protectli hardware + pfsense/opnsense.
You can also get cheaper mini PC’s on Alibaba for cheap. I did this in 2017 and it’s still going strong. No moving parts, all passively cooked with an Intel laptop chip that has hardware encryption built in (core i5).
pfSense on a ZimaBoard 216 works astonishingly well and it’s easy to setup and manage. Toss in a Mikrotik CSS610 and you have a vlan ready setup in under an hour.
If you don’t like the ZimaBoard, you can go with any of the Topton style router PCs from AliExpress for a couple hundred and have a 2.5Gb router running in proxmox with docker in a separate VM.
pfSense is great!!! I bought a Netgate router which comes with pfSense Plus.
OP, consider buying a Netgate router if you want no hassle, or if you’re up for installing an OS then you can put pfSense on a custom platform like ZimaBoard or Protectli.
I just bought my own hardware and loaded PFSense. Put the ISP modem in bridged mode to disable all of their nonsense.
I set the DNS servers I want in PFSense and that filters down to everything on the network.
Lot of good choices:
One of the 4 port atom pcs on Amazon, or even one of the arm ones, the key is ethernet ports and remember you’ll need to handle your wifi. Put debian, pfsense, openwrt, whatever you like, it’ll be great.
One of the openwrt systems, a high end glinet isn’t bad, just any of the better ones.
Had a freebsd server that run a vnet jail for routing, was glorious, no notes, jut perfect.
Running a unifi dream machine se right now, mostly because I want someone else to handle security (I know it’s not much, I just don’t have any bandwidth for that now). Works fine, but I’m using unifi wifi so it’s a tie-in there.
If you want a retail system, either openwrt or unifi, I know why people have issues with ubiquiti, but it’s probably the best prosumer hardware and software you can get without using your own. I haven’t used pfsense much, maybe that would change my mind.
For me personally… I use VyOS in a VM running on a proxmox host (optiplex, SFF) with a 4-port NIC passthrough. This solves the issue of power for me, as the host has plenty of ram allowing me to run other services without needing an additional machine (although I do have one as a spare). VyOS doesn’t currently have a GUI (one is in development), however, it has been very solid for me (also based on debian, which is nice).
Just wanna put in a good word about GL-iNet routers … they are more travel- and pro-sumer focused than a lot of what’s been mentioned here. They run a proprietary front end on top of OpenWRT, but if you don’t like that, most of them have full support in vanilla OpenWRT.
These are definitely more for the tinkerer market, their documentation and firmware can have quirks, but that being said (and as somebody who wouldbe wary at that caveat) I have been using GLi routers with manufacturer firmware as a daily driver for 3+ years and once you get them set up they are very solid.
Might be a good option for the digital nomads among us who need a smaller device which can connect to a host network and then send all traffic over a VPN with very easy setup.
Do they have mesh options?
Good question, I’m not entirely sure as I have never used mesh features per se.
I do currently use a GLi Creta as a wifi extender to a GLi Slate AX, but that’s likely not what you’re asking about (I believe it’s a layer 3 (?) bridge from WWAN to WLAN/LAN). It does work pretty well in this role, all factors considered.
I bought a cheapish small PC with 4 Nics and ran pfsense for a long time, that’s your best best. I’ve ended up with a Ubiquiti Dream Machine, less time to tinker and higher need for production with working from home
Old computer, or Raspberry pi with proxmox and pfsense on it. The positive thing is that you can run other servers as well (pi-hole for example for network wide blocking ads)
I’ve been relying on pfSense for around a decade.
If you’re pfSense anyway, pfBlockerNG provides the same AD related DNS sinkhole functionality of pi-hole without the need for a whole separate machine/VM to manage.
You could also use OpnSense and install AdGuard Home on that.
I’m guessing I would need to get a modem too then, no? I’ve got the BT router that takes the DSL connection directly currently
Firewalla Gold is nice. Has lots of advanced but in a more user friendly interface.
floridaman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Check out the OpenWRT Table of Hardware, it has a list of firmware mod-able off the shelf WiFi routers that work with, you guessed it, OpenWRT. It’s rather versatile as it’s Linux based and can handle VLANs, multiple SSIDs, and of course, you can change the DNS servers.
ch1cken@kbin.social 1 year ago
+1 for openwrt, its great
victoitor@lemmy.eco.br 1 year ago
This!
If you want a Linux router instead of a BSD one for hardware compatibility, it will run on anything pfsense or opnsense will run and on much much more.