Best router for home use?

Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 99 points – 1 years ago

I am planning to eventually build my own home server, and when I do I will hook it up via ethernet. But I do want to switch away from the generic FIOS router and use my own for more control over my data and security. Any recommendations?

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This right here. get something cheap, throw opnsense or pfsense on it and start learning. It will probably be incredibly frustrating at first but when it starts to click then it is really fun and rewarding.

I bought an old dell r210ii years ago and threw pfsense on it then swapped to opnsense and could not be happier. It is still in use today, a good 6 years later.

I did mine by just adding some iptables rules to set up NAT. It's all of four commands:

echo "net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1" >> /etc/sysctl.conf

iptables –t nat -s 192.168.0.0/16 –A POSTROUTING –o $wan0 -j MASQUERADE

iptables –A FORWARD –i $wan0 –o $lan0 –m state --state RELATED, ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

iptables –A FORWARD –i $lan0 –o $wan0 –j ACCEPT

Just set $lan0 and $wan0 to your LAN and WAN interfaces. For wifi I've got a couple Unifi access points around the house for good coverage.

Yes, I know IPv6 is better and yadda yadda yadda but I can't remember the addresses let alone type them so I'm not changing anything.

I did this as well, but I'm wondering if it was the wrong call. It's harder to work with firewalls (particularly if docker is involved), and I've struggled with stuff like SyncThing.

Most likely more learning could solve it, but I wonder if I should switch to a dedicated router OS where more support resources are available.

I've got almost all of my services running on a separate, bigger system and only have a couple ports open on this one. Iptables isn't too hard once you understand the shorthand.

I think my problem is trying to run docker at the same time. Docker messes heavily with iptables and makes it a real pain.

The only docker containers I run on my router are a simple search proxy and an Infrared instance that routes Minecraft server connections to another box on my LAN. But IIRC that took a bunch of fiddling

Noob here. How fast can my LAN be with such a setup?

mine can push a gig around no problem.

As fast as the slowest denominator in your LAN. So give the PC that you're going to host this on a decent Ethernet card and you should be flying.