Advice On Proposed Router Design

sonori, 3 months ago

If you have an always on server, you can always run Opnsense as a vm.

Lem453, 1 month ago

For people starting out, I highly recommend not doing this. You want to be able to mess with your server without bringing down the whole network.

sonori, 1 month ago

If you have a hypervisor in a home lab, which it turns out OP does not, odds are good your already running a DNS filter/ server, DHCP server, AD domain, etc so the whole network is down anyway during hypervisor restarts if you don’t have HA setup.

sabreW4K3, 3 months ago

Just my RPi, hence the looking for another SBC to do the routing.

TCB13, 3 months ago

Do you really want to have a router and an AP? Why not go all-in-one?

Your NanoPi board is great, I used a couple of those and I’ve nothing against them. About OPNSense why?? Can’t you just run OpenWRT, what feature does it miss? People throw OPNSense like a good solution for everyone while in fact they don’t even use 1/100 of its features. You’re not running a large scale 100+ clients with dozens of APs then OpenWRT is more than enough. To be fair even at that scale OpenWRT would work just fine as well.

You might want to check the table of hardware of OpenWrt at openwrt.org/toh/…/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi and openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864_ac-wifi for decent WiFi 6 capable routers. One solid pick for the future might be the Netgear WAX2* line or the GL.iNet GL-MT6000. One of those models is now fully supported the others are on the way. If you don’t mind having older wifi a Netgear R7800 is solid.

For a full open-source hardware and software experience you need a more exotic brand like those. The BananaPi BPi R3 and here is a very good option with a 4 core CPU, 2GB of RAM Wifi6 and two 2.5G SFP ports besides the 4 ethernet ports. There’s also an upcoming board the BPI-R4 with optional Wifi 7 and 10G SPF.

While there are things like OPNsense and pfSense that may make sense in some cases you most likely don’t require that. You’ve a small network and OpenWRT will provide you with a much cleaner open-source experience and also allow for all the customization you would like. Another great advantage of OpenWRT you’ve the ability to install 3rd party stuff in your router, you may even use qemu to virtualize stuff like your Pi-Hole on it or simply run docker containers.

Even of you don’t want something Wifi + Router all-in-one, the information above still holds. For instance the Banana Pi BPI-R4 is available on AliExpress for around 130€ and has a LOT more I/O than the NanoPi R6S.

About the switch, forget that crap, for the price of that link you may be able to get a decent TP-Link switch from a local store with that many ports. Like this one with some managed features or this dumb one. At the end of the day I would pick the first one cause it will provide you with good VLAN support.

sabreW4K3, 3 months ago

This post is tremendous, thank you.

I originally planned to go for an all in one, but then started finding cool stuff and it made sense to make it so I could swap out bits of the set-up without having to replace the whole thing.

OPNSense versus OpenWRT. I got lead astray! 😂 but seriously, everyone says that eventually everyone ends up running OPNSense anyway.

Regarding the Banana Pi, I was looking at them for ages and someone said to go for the NanoPi over it as the support on the software NanoPi is better.

Regarding the rest of you post, I’m still trying to digest it. Clicking links and reading stuff, but I wanted to thank you. Truly!

TCB13, 3 months ago

Regarding the Banana Pi, I was looking at them for ages and someone said to go for the NanoPi over it as the support on the software NanoPi is better.

I guess it depends. The BananaPi guys work very closely with the OpenWRT people, if you notice they usually provide testing / dev boards to members of the community before releasing things, they commit code to the project and their routers are usually OpenWRT first. There’s also an upcoming OpenWRT router from them that has been designed in collaboration with OpenWRT developers.

NanoPi has Armbian which is fine and nice however if you want a router, great OpenWRT compatibility is certainly more important.

everyone says that eventually everyone ends up running OPNSense anyway

I have to disagree with this. That’s mostly hype and people who don’t know what they’re doing, there are good reasons do pick OPNsense at a medium size company with a large and complex deployment but certainly not at a smaller scale. Either way OpenWRT is highly modular and very well documented you can just install whatever you require.

sabreW4K3, 3 months ago

I was reading the comments on the OpenWRT forums about the new router, even the people there feel it’s underpowered.

If it can run OpenWRT and PiHole, I’ll be happy.

TCB13, 3 months ago

What router? The OpenWrt One or the BPI?

sabreW4K3, 3 months ago

The OpenWRT one

TCB13, 3 months ago

What were you expecting? It’s a thing designed to be under 100$, there are no miracles there. Get one of the BPI routers if you want performance. From time to time there are nice deals on aliexpress for those.

Wolfizen, 3 months ago

Your router and wireless access point seem OK. The switch looks suspicious, there is conflicting information in the description, some parts indicate Managed and some indicate Unmanaged. I caution against that switch specifically.

sabreW4K3, 3 months ago

Bloody hell, thank you!