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
I never even thought about a guest network for different services. Why do you do that, if you don’t mind? Privacy?
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.
Does peloton do that!? 🥲
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 only got into privacy stuff like a year ago, but I was really focused on thinking about my phone and not as much my home network (unless we’re talking like, cloud services that are also accessed on desktop, I was already worried about those). That’s a spooky but totally valid thought imo. Agree, would be a good new rabbit hole to explore.
It’s a big rabbit hole for sure, with how many household devices are internet connected and the concerning capabilities they offer. And an expensive one if you seek to replace devices at home.
Guest Network in OpenWRT prevents inter-device communication on the LAN. So the thing can talk to its cloud service or whatever but can’t see my phone/laptop/PCs.
This means that untrusted devices which get pw0ned (or are surveillance-by-design) can’t then get into your more important machines. Most people use guest networks for IoT devices like Ring cams and smart washing machines but I don’t even own shit like that.
Lol I also passed up on ring cameras, i’d like to have a camera someday but I don’t want to go through Amazon.
I wonder if I should set up a guest network for my mother-in-law. 🤔 My husband is very on-board with my privacy-focused desires and cautious about what we invite into the home but my MIL, well, is old.