Having got my Raspberry Pi for Christmas, I was finally able to enter the world of home labs and I’m slowly getting everything up and running.

That said, one thing I was super excited about but hasn’t come to fruition was Pi-Hole. That’s for two reasons, one my Pi isn’t hardwired into the router and two my router kinda sucks (Virgin Media Hub 5).

So I came here to ask for recommendations for a router. One that would allow me to run vLANs and use my Pi for adblocking. Honestly the advice I got was like fire and I was like water.

I wanted a simple cheap solution and everyone was like just spend 🥺

Eventually though, my ignorance waned and I started looking into what the suggestions were, which was essentially buy an N100 Firewall Mini PC with 4 Ethernet Port, load up PFSense or OpenWRT, then buy an Access Point, connect it and profit.

So with my dreams of a £50 plug and play experience down the drain, can someone explain to me how it all works? Why is this the suggestion? My Pi is kinda set and leave. My NAS is set and leave, will a firewall PC be the same? Also why a firewall PC over a second Pi?

  • EdgarallenpwnEnglish
    32·
    11 months ago

    If you can find a cheap off lease/used enterprise workstation and get a decent nic that could take your budget down for a router . I was running an optiplex 9010 with a i340-T4 as my opnsense box for years and that was ~75 USD in 2020.

    Edit: I ended up picking this little box a year ago for 60 bucks and love it. Way less awkward in the living room than a sff PC as a router.

      • EdgarallenpwnEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Yeah I haven’t noticed any noise. It’s fanless and the whole outer case is the heatsink. It is pretty heavy for it’s size though