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? 🌞
The layout I’m designing around is inline: ISP router, then a small dual-ethernet box doing firewall and DNS filtering, then your LAN. For a start, I’d put OPNsense on a cheap dual-NIC mini PC. You get network-wide blocking through a plugin and a VPN to reach your NAS, and VLANs can wait until you need them. I’m biased, since I’m building a box with that exact layout. What I can’t settle: for someone starting out, is an all-in-one box less scary, or does it hide the stuff you’d want to learn?