Nice to be of your help.

How’s OpenWRT to use and install. Though pretty experienced with linux. This is the first time trying to do the hardcore networking stuff.

It has intel graphics.

That is a cool idea, perhaps a project of router thing doesn’t work out.

I read on OPNSense guide it needs 2gb ram to run, it would be difficult to even get a 1gb ram for it. Not to say expensive too.

I have an old Raspberry Pi as PiHole and another Pihole running on as a virtual machine. I have an ryzen PC running as a NAS and Jellyfin.

I was trying to get a half decent PC to make a firewall router out of.

Thanks i was planning to put OpenWRT or DD WRT on it ditching Windows XP

I have a Realtek and an intel NIC which I have not tried. Both are PCI. I am more worried about software, OpenWRT or DDR WRT work with it.

Maybe do a cmos reset

One laptop, 2 ssd, 4 Proxmox lxcs, 3 docker containers, 2 routers.

You can use cockpit which is a lightweight server management software, uses extensions for increasing capabilities.

That’s a lot to learn.

Me too.

What benefits to running it as an VM rather than on bare metal.

I was doing that but I have a Windows PC on the network and have fucked up Samba too many times to be confident to do it again.