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? 🌞
it’s worth mentioning mine is over 10 years old and was that cheap when I bought it. If you can find a fanless design, these will last ages since there’s a few simple non-moving components that do the same kind of work all day every day and don’t take a ton of abuse. Even after all these years, the CPU on mine sits mostly idle even with heavy traffic. Modern software is just very efficient.
Another reason the router/firewall lasts is because I use a dedicated WiFi antenna. This is another part that gets the same work every day. I’ve upgraded mine twice, but it was almost double the speed each time, and I didn’t have to spend extra money on routing hardware that was still plenty powerful.