Was rather shocked to find BT hubs don’t allow you to change DNS servers anymore and force you to use their own ones, so I can’t properly setup adguard.
What routers are people using now that are reliable and will let me control my own network configuration
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Mikrotik. The depth and breadth of a tiny Hex S is mind blowing.
Been using my Hex S for 4 years and couldn’t been happier. It’s crashed on me the total amount of zero times.
I love my Microtik hEX S. It takes a minute to get used to the menus, but I really like how everything is laid out and managing using winbox. For 70 bucks it has a hell of a lot of features.
Before that I used a Ubiquiti Edgerouter X which I liked pretty well but I was not a fan of the web interface, it felt very dated; I also had issues with certain firmware updates that made the device pretty unstable. Eventually it kind of just died so I replaced it with this. I think I paid $50 for the ER-X, definitely recommend spending a little more for the hEX S.
One thing the hEX S can not do (at least that I have found) that the ER-X can that I care about is running a MDNS repeater. I have a couple subnets including one for IoT devices so this is necessary, as a slightly jank solution I ended up spinning up an Ubuntu server VM with separate NICs on the subnets I wanted to repeat between and running this binary to do the deed: https://github.com/geekman/mdns-repeater - if anyone knows of a better solution plz let me know.
I like mikrotik, but if you’re not familiar with routers and their configurations, then it’s going to be a steep learning curve.
The hex S is wonderful. I don’t have one but I keep going back to look at it and weigh my options.
I don’t need another router, I really don’t. But it’s so nice! But I don’t need it!
I have Juniper, Cisco, watchguard, sonicwall, ubiquiti… So many routers and firewalls, I really do not need another one.
But I want one.
Check out the OpenWRT Table of Hardware, it has a list of firmware mod-able off the shelf WiFi routers that work with, you guessed it, OpenWRT. It’s rather versatile as it’s Linux based and can handle VLANs, multiple SSIDs, and of course, you can change the DNS servers.
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Literally anything that’s not ISP provided should give you the flexibility to set your own network parameters, but if you want strong flexibility beyond that, I’m going to throw my recommendation to opnSense, it’s a fork of pfSense and the only reason I like it over pfSense is that the interface is very different and to me, it makes a lot more sense in how it’s laid out.
That’s personal preference, YMMV.
For consumer gear, ubiquiti has some strong units, the ER-X is pretty reasonable, but the unifi line is somewhat more beginner friendly, but tends to bury advanced features a little bit, focusing more on usage and reporting of activity and such.
Lower end consumer, the usual contenders are tp-link, and Netgear, though I lean more towards stuff from Asus, or anything on the dd-wrt compatibility lists… I ran a Linksys WRT54GL for a long time because of dd-wrt. I haven’t kept up with the “wrt” variants over time… The last time I touched dd-wrt was on a relatively high end (at the time) Asus router and it did very well… Might be work looking into. There’s usually a trick to getting wrt firmware into a router though, and it will likely void your warranty, so buyer beware.
Circling back… My biggest issue with opnSense and pfSense, is the choice of hardware, unless you’re buying direct from pfSense’s netgate product line, you’ll have to source something to run it on, and my biggest issue with that, personally, is that I want something small, like a router, IMO, should be, at least smaller than most PC’s, that’s relatively inexpensive, with at least two built in ethernet ports, since I’ve found that USB ethernet options are generally not very reliable. And usually, I can find something small and cheap, but there’s only one ethernet port, or I can find something cheap with plenty of networking, but it’s not small, or I can find something small with plenty of networking, but it’s not cheap.
So I’m running a sonicwall at home, because fuck all this other junk, I just want something that does what I want it to do without hiding all my options behind some garbage, or a system that can only work a particular way, and you don’t get options to change it. Or something that’s huge or expensive… Or something I have to spend a lot of time setting up, maintaining, or fixing. For me, that’s sonicwall.
This is also similar reasoning and why I went with a mikrotik router. All the functionality I need, none of the bullshit, solid performance for price. Only downside is the setup isn’t trivial, but if you’re comfortable on the command line, it’s a breeze.
For me personally… I use VyOS in a VM running on a proxmox host (optiplex, SFF) with a 4-port NIC passthrough. This solves the issue of power for me, as the host has plenty of ram allowing me to run other services without needing an additional machine (although I do have one as a spare). VyOS doesn’t currently have a GUI (one is in development), however, it has been very solid for me (also based on debian, which is nice).
Pfsense is fantastic. Extremely flexible. I am contemplating switching to opensense when it’s time for an upgrade (it’s been running seamlessly for many years, but someday I’ll need to).
Note that it’s a router, not a wireless access point. For that I use a few Ubiquity APs (I forget the model).
pfSense is indeed fantastic. The best part about it is you can install it on pretty much anything, as long as you have a couple reasonably fast network interfaces and an okay-ish processor depending on the network load it will just work. Also has OpenVPN server baked in which is pretty cool
It also comes with a dyndns-client built in. Very useful for updating the address of the OpenVPN server.
What I did is I bought a cheap small PC with an Intel chip (i5), some RAM and an SSD. You can find these with more than one NIC pretty easily from Amazon, and they are just normal computers: only small and quiet. Then go with a virtualization platform such as Proxmox, and to that, install opnSense as the router distribution and use the rest of the processing power to run everything else in your house in virtual machines: Home Assistant, media server, you name it… Just search Amazon with something like “router pc” and you get a long list of machines below and over 200 euros that are more than enough for your home. Computers like this one.
The great thing about opnSense is how it gets regular updates. And when you use a normal PC as your router, you run the latest FreeBSD kernel and get updates basically as long as opnSense is developed.
You probably also want a Wi-Fi. These boxes usually miss it, and even when they have a Wi-Fi card, opnSense is not really great for setting wireless networks. I just bought a few APs from Ubiquiti. They are a bit on the expensive side, but I just don’t need to touch these things after setting them up and the network never fails on me. There are also much cheaper APs in the market, just get anything that fits to your budget and plug it to the router.
Opnsense or openwrt devices.
If you have a pi kicking around or a docker instance of pihole you can use it to take over dhcp of the router and then set the dns servers in pihole.
That’s what I do currently on my home hub
That might be the way to do it. I’m somewhat unfamiliar with networking, what does DHCP do?
DHCP strands for dynamic host control protocol. It is a server that assigns dynamic IP addresses to devices on the network which request it.
So the pi takes over dchp and assigns itsself as a DNS server? I assume if I want to assign static IPs I have to do it through the pi from then on?
Can’t use pihole because I’m running NixOS on my pi and the only way to run it is via docker container (which melts down my system, believe it’s trying to emulate x86 for some reason)
Surprised to see no mention of the Edgerouter X in this thread so far.
Honestly, if you’re looking for a simple, highly customizable router that comes with its own hardware, and don’t mind supplying a separate access point, you really can do a lot worse than the ERX. They’re small, highly affordable, use very little power, and it’s all just Debian under the hood so you can do an astonishing amount with them.
