Now that I have time for hobbies again I wanna dive right in to building up a home lab. Right now I just have a Netgear router that reached end of life, and a NAS i’d like to make accessible remotely, and a DIY router seems like the correct next step for me. I’m very interested in ad-blocking network wide and someday I’d like to host my own little webpage, but for now I’m really just barely getting started.

I’m information gathering, I don’t know what I don’t know and my networking skills are pretty weak anyway. But even if your needs and desires have nothing to do with mine, I also just like to hear people talk about their set ups. Please? 🌞

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    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.

      • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        9 minutes ago

        There are a number of issues with pfSense. The updates for the community edition are slow. They are trying to push everyone to the paid version. You can’t even download an ISO to install it offline anymore. You have to make a Netgate account to download an installer that needs an internet connection to run.

        NTP is network time protocol. It’s used to get the time over the network. Using a GPS receiver as the clock source makes it more accurate and allows it to work without an internet connection.