Can you please tell me all about your DIY router?

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? 🌞

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.

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 😅