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? 🌞

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

EDIT: my favorite thing about Skynet is the new-ish ability to filter by country

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.

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.

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

I got a spiffy little fanless micro PC with five Ethernet ports, installed Ubuntu, and wrote my own iptables rules and installed pihole.

OPNsense on used dell optiplex. Very easy but it can do whatever you want to grow into as you learn more.

OpnSense running on an ex-lease HP i3-something SFF desktop. Added several cheap half-height GigEth PCIe cards for the LAN bridge.

It is way over spec for what OpnSense needs but it was cheap and extensible.

UPS power supply.

There's a tangle of PoE injectors which makes me sad. PoE PCIe cards appear to be ludicrously expensive here for no apparent reason.

What's the throughput on that bad boi?

This is what I'm doing too. I'm super happy with the results and how many options are now open to me.

I've only tested up to 1Gb. It does 1Gb no probs, with SQM (QoS) which burns a lot of CPU.

I have a Flint 2 with OpenWRT installed, it handles all my home networking. I have a handful of vLANs and I think the count is still 5 APs. I am currently considering adding a 6th for HA to TV vLAN, one that cannot access the WAN just HA. People have disagreements over OpenWRT and pfsense, or opensense not sure which is the “FOSS” version, but OpenWRT is not going to try and upsell you.

I am sure OpenWRT offers some ad blocking but I already had two finally tuned piholes. There are arguments between pihole and adguard home. I started with pihole I have tried adguard but went back to pihole.

Opnsense on whatever. Plus pihole for DNS/adblock.

This is what I did before I went to all unifi gear.

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'm eyeing a similar one, but with 2x sfp+ ports too.

I was Unifi gear and then went back to Opnsense :P. That shit is way too expensive to replace.

I never even thought about a guest network for different services. Why do you do that, if you don't mind? Privacy?

dell optiplex

How many NICs can you cram in these? I added a second one to my Lenovo Tinys but some more are nice for a FW..

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.

Originally I was thinking I'd find a used business mini pc and put some open source router OS on there, still haven't picked which one. But I've gotten super into, like, being cautious about power consumption and some of the little boxes you can get on AliExpress seem like that might be a better option? I'm not sure yet. What's a Protectli, if you don't mind?

I put Opnsense on an Intel Pentium G3220 and it's been rock solid for gigabit.

You could configure different settings, such as preventing the device from connecting to ad servers. You also prevent it from scanning your network to learn about all your devices, since all it would be limited to that isolated network.

Two NIC. I'm usually using the SFF. I went 10G last year and it's been so great. Single, used, low profile, dual port SFP+ module. One port has SFP+ to RJ45 to my modem. Other port is SFP+ passive DAC to a used Brocade ICX 2750.

I've seen a lot of people on YouTube talking about this or that cast off networking device that they turned into a router. I do find the idea of repurposing especially old tech appealing. Or did you buy it brand new?

Now THAT is diy

Does it run cool enough?

I have something similar it’s been working great.

I have been thinking of trying to set up a “router on a stick” as a live backup but once I started researching it, it got daunting.

Is the power consumption too bad, if you know?

The extended warranty is pretty damn good, but that's expensive too lol

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.

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

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

I'm gonna ask you the same question I'm asking everyone using office mini PCs, do you know what kind of power draw? I'm really into the idea of cheap, but I'm also getting super into green energy.

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.

Different person. But I have proxmox on multiple mini PC (Lenovo and HP600). They max out at 65w but pull less most of the time. I suppose I should check the weekly average, but my power monitor is on the other side of the UPS and there are multiple mini PC, devices, switches, modem, wireless AP... All on the monitor. If I had to guess I'd say the router/pihole pulls <30w and the media rig with its HDDs pulls ~100 but only when it's read/writing. The full stack idles <100 including AP/switches, way less then my gaming PC just on idle (>700 when the GPU is GPing).

(Power efficiency is nice, but the ROI for a new ARM / RISK system is probably not great now. Better to use a recycled rig pulling 40-100w now and upgrading in a few years. It's not like you need a server rack pulling over a kilowatt, and the efficiency gain from 5-10 year old x86 vs ARM/RISK is less then swapping out an old incandescent light to an LED.

Can I ask why you didn't like adguard as much? :o

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.

Yeah, it’s barely doing anything except shifting packets and doing DNS. Load is around 0.08 on a four core processor.

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.

That was years ago so I do not remember. Maybe it was that I was just used to pihole? If I tried now I think the answer would be the same, but it would be because I have a finally curated list and regex.

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 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.

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!

That actually sounds fantastic, low power, low cost, repurposed tech meets a trifecta I didn't really know was possible and is exactly what I'd want.

I'm not really sure what anyone would need > 2.5 for tbh. If anyone wants to tell me, I'd appreciate it, I see so many network guys on YouTube talking about 10gig, and I don't know why 😅

Does peloton do that!? 🥲

Oh that's something I hadn't thought about at all! Hmmm

I don't know. Is it internet connected? If so I wouldn't trust it...

Many home grade routers allow you to set up a guest WiFi network though so you may be able to isolate it that way if you're concerned/can determine what telemetry it's sending from the privacy policy or other reports.

This article talks about their website's standard creepy tracking cookies and stuff, which depressingly everyone does.
https://blog.avast.com/what-peloton-knows-about-you-avast

But if it has Bluetooth and WiFi it has a lot of potential for tracking all sorts of things. I don't have one and don't know if they're using that potential, but it's there. It would be interesting to investigate.

i had a cheap made in china consumer router with mt7621 on it, porting openwrt was surprisingly easy and its been running well enough for the past 5 years. adguard home runs on it and handles dns adblocking

It’s currently a N100 mini-pc running Debian, but in the past it’s been all kinds of random hardware including a busted old laptop with an expresscard-PCIe riser for the second NIC. Anything can be a router if you know what you’re doing!

https://nbailey.ca/post/router/

Can I ask why you need something custom for work? I'm myself curious how I'll make my DIY set up play nice with my job's VPN 😅

I usually just use proper network devices. OpenWRT will generally run on anything with Mediatec or Qualcomm based assuming it has support

Highly niche requirements not serviced by available hardware without costing waaaay too much. For example, we're currently using Cisco Meraki MX85, and even they're not quite there.