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!

I got an N100 motherboard with 4x GB ports and installed ubuntu. Configured 1 port for the ISP, 1 port for a guest network, and bridged the last two with a WIFI PCIe card for the trusted network. hostapd to manage the wifi, and it took a couple tries before I found a card that really handled AP mode well. dhcpd, radvd. bind 9 for DNS, integrated with dhcpd so clients can declare their own hostname. There’s a separate pihole in front of that. Took a while to discover that I had to specifically configure dhclient to the ISP to request IPv6 prefix delegation. The guest network port goes to a ddwrt router.

It also runs a mythtv backend, a couple web sites; immich, jellyfin, and paperless ngx containers. In my head, it’s more of a server with router functions glued on, where […]sense is more of a router with server functions glued on.

I was comfortable with cli administration, and the router side sort of grew organically, with a little victory each time I could unplug another appliance - first a WAP, then a switch. opn/pf-sense is probably an easier way to get into the DIY space, especially if you want to replace your whole infrastructure at one time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Opnsense on whatever. Plus pihole for DNS/adblock.

Right now I’m using a Fortigate 101E, but eons back I used a simple PC built as cheaply as possible, installed Linux, ip_forward = 1, and iptables.

I am, however, tempted to build something semi-professional based on a banana pi, as I need something custom for work.

I had a virtualized PFsense box for a while doing my inherent. Was actually pretty solid even when having to wrangle the quirks having a virtualized firewall/router caused.

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.

Not sure how “DIY” you want to go. I’ve been liking OPNSense though. Running it on an air cooled Protectli box.

Handles a symmetric 2Gbps connection just fine.

My setup consists of an x86 “network appliance”. They’re low-cost, low-power, sometime headless units that can run most any open-source software solution. Even with RAM as bad as it is, you can find these for less than $200 from multiple sources if you’re okay with 2.5Gbps. If you did need more than that, you’d have to build something custom likely, unless it’s a small-business class device.

If you’re just getting into the network software side of things, I recommend experimenting off-Internet for a while with a few different operating systems. Find which one has a user-interface you enjoy and can wrap your head around since in a personal homelab, they almost all meet the requirements. My personal choice for software ended up being OPNSense.

I run all of my other services that aren’t network related on separate hardware via a managed switch just to keep things isolated and the rest is up to you.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.

[Thread #130 for this comm, first seen 15th Oct 2026, 21:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

OpenWRT all the way.

Skynet firewall

PiHole

Stable IP addresses and a private interface for family phones/laptops/pcs

Guest network for nasty Roku TV/peleton

OpenWrt on Raspberry Pi 4 with UE300 dongle for the WAN side. 7 years of trouble-free operation so far.