What are the best customizable routers nowadays?

flashgnash@lemm.ee to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 139 points –

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 adguard.

What routers are people using now that are reliable and will let me control my own network configuration

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Mikrotik. The depth and breadth of a tiny Hex S is mind blowing.

What i love about Mikrotik is. You buy it once and own it. Unlike something like Cisco or Juniper. You got tons of licensing fees.

Been using my Hex S for 4 years and couldn't been happier. It's crashed on me the total amount of zero times.

I love my Microtik hEX S. It takes a minute to get used to the menus, but I really like how everything is laid out and managing using winbox. For 70 bucks it has a hell of a lot of features.

Before that I used a Ubiquiti Edgerouter X which I liked pretty well but I was not a fan of the web interface, it felt very dated; I also had issues with certain firmware updates that made the device pretty unstable. Eventually it kind of just died so I replaced it with this. I think I paid $50 for the ER-X, definitely recommend spending a little more for the hEX S.

One thing the hEX S can not do (at least that I have found) that the ER-X can that I care about is running a MDNS repeater. I have a couple subnets including one for IoT devices so this is necessary, as a slightly jank solution I ended up spinning up an Ubuntu server VM with separate NICs on the subnets I wanted to repeat between and running this binary to do the deed: https://github.com/geekman/mdns-repeater - if anyone knows of a better solution plz let me know.

I converted everything over to Mikrotik earlier this year. Excellent hardware and software and cheap. But has a bit of a learning curve.

I like mikrotik, but if you're not familiar with routers and their configurations, then it's going to be a steep learning curve.

The hex S is wonderful. I don't have one but I keep going back to look at it and weigh my options.

I don't need another router, I really don't. But it's so nice! But I don't need it!

I have Juniper, Cisco, watchguard, sonicwall, ubiquiti..... So many routers and firewalls, I really do not need another one.

But I want one.

Can confirm, I bit the bullet for a CR2004 last year and it took me a couple of weeks at least to set it up the way I wanted. Powerful, but steep with a capital S.