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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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.
I did this for a while, but decided to just run opnsense on bare metal, I didn’t want my whole network going down if I had to restart Proxmox or something. It’s way overkill but it’s running opnsense, adguard and will soon be running ngnix hopefully.
It’s also a good choice. What I like about opnSense is how it’s basically just a distribution you update from the shell, feels more like a real operating system compared to OpenWRT, which is usually flashed to the router.
Opnsense or openwrt devices.
This is the way. Love OPNsense!
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.
Can confirm - I am on an edgerouter x for years now - you can do anything you want with it. It’s not casual friendly - just keep that in mind.
I have been using this for years and cannot recommend it enough. It’s literally the perfect home router in my opinion. Highly customizable, affordable, small, no gimped features “for ease of use” or whatever bs and extremely stable - I have never once had to touch it or reboot it after setting it up, which is more than I can say for any other router. The only downside is that you do have supply an AP separately.
It’s a great little machine. The downside, though, is that it’s not that powerful at all. With hardware offload enabled and features like QoS turned off, you’ll get about ~600mbps of max total bandwidth shared between up/down.
For most people that shouldn’t be an issue, though.
What AP would you recommend for use with it?
Honestly, your average SOHO router can easily be turned into a good enough access point. I’m using an old Asus router for mine. A Ubiquity access point is also a solid choice for cost vs performance. Or give TP-Link a look, they’re always a decent bet for wireless.
I have a ubiquity commerical AP, though only because I happened to get it for free. It’s probably overkill for home needs.
Yeah this is what I’ve been running for the last few years. Incredibly stable and does everything that you want for a small network. Even has poe passthrough if your AP supports that
Surprised that no one has mentioned the Fresh Tomato project
There’s a ton of functionality built into it, and it is regularly updated.
That’s depend on how deep you want to go with router customization. Most casual enthusiasts would do fine using an Asus router. Out of the box, the firmware is based on an opensource firmware (Tomato) and has a lot of features and options compared to their competitors. Feature-wise, it already blows other consumer-grade routers out of water. And because the firmware’s source is available, third-party firmware (asuswrt-merlin) is thriving and can be flashed with zero risk while adding a whole bunch of new features and customization options.
If you want something more, then your only options are using enterprise-grade routers (e.g. mikrotik, ubiquity, etc). Just note that these enterprise gears usually don’t have latest WiFi tech (or even WiFi at all!), so you’ll still need to buy another wifi access point and hook them downsteam of the router.
Does the bt hub let you turn off DHCP? I had a similar issue with my ISP router, but it let me turn off dhcp and then I ran pihole which can run its own DHCP server.
Then, the DHCP server can tell all clients to use your preferred DNS server.
I haven’t used adguard, but it can probably do the same. If not, you can run a DHCP client on the same box probably.
I just bought my own hardware and loaded PFSense. Put the ISP modem in bridged mode to disable all of their nonsense.
I set the DNS servers I want in PFSense and that filters down to everything on the network.
Lots of good suggestions. The down side to a pc running opnsense is going to be electricity costs. If that’s a concern.
Any of the Asus routers supported by Merlin will do what you need. (That’s what I’m currently doing). It has a feature called DNS control that will intercept DNS lookups and send them to the servers you define.
Edit: opnsense not nonsense.
There are mini pcs running atom or celeron with impressive specs and Gbit capability that use <15w
Yeah that’s actually a long term goal of mine. Get one of those soc boxes with 4 eth ports designed to be a pf/opnsense box.
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).
MikroTik is super powerful, customizable and affordable.
I run OpenWRT on a RaspberryPi and it’s great. Happy to answer questions.
Where did you attach the second ethernet NIC?
I used USB Ethernet adapters in both USB ports. TP-Link UE300, been rock solid.
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.
I just ordered a Netgate SG-1100 and I am beyond excited to spend the next few days seeing what this thing can do.
Old computer, or Raspberry pi with proxmox and pfsense on it. The positive thing is that you can run other servers as well (pi-hole for example for network wide blocking ads)
I’m guessing I would need to get a modem too then, no? I’ve got the BT router that takes the DSL connection directly currently
I’ve been relying on pfSense for around a decade.
If you’re using pfSense anyway, pfBlockerNG provides the same AD related DNS sinkhole functionality of pi-hole without the need for a whole separate machine/VM to manage.
You could also use OpnSense and install AdGuard Home on that.
Mikrotik. The depth and breadth of a tiny Hex S is mind blowing.
I converted everything over to Mikrotik earlier this year. Excellent hardware and software and cheap. But has a bit of a learning curve.
I got a hEX S a few weeks ago and I love it
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.
Can confirm, I bit the bullet for a CR2004 last year and it took me a couple of weeks at least to set it up the way I wanted. Powerful, but steep with a capital S.
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.
What i love about Mikrotik is. You buy it once and own it. Unlike something like Cisco or Juniper. You got tons of licensing fees.
I’ve got a Mikrotik RB4011, and I couldn’t be happier with it. It definitely has a learning curve, but once I got it setup how I want, it just works. I’m sure some other options have the same feature, but one of my favorite things is a script I have run every night that emails me a backup.
I’ve only ever had to use it a few times, but having a recent backup of my router on hand all the time is nice.
I’ve been very happy with my RB5009. I ditched my Edgrouter X because it’s not getting software updates anymore. Pros and cons to both, but Mikrotik/RouterOS is starting to make a lot more sense to me, and at this point I’m more comfortable with it than I ever was with EdgeOS.
