Now that I have time for hobbies again I wanna dive right in to building up a home lab. Right now I just have a Netgear router that reached end of life, and a NAS i’d like to make accessible remotely, and a DIY router seems like the correct next step for me. I’m very interested in ad-blocking network wide and someday I’d like to host my own little webpage, but for now I’m really just barely getting started.
I’m information gathering, I don’t know what I don’t know and my networking skills are pretty weak anyway. But even if your needs and desires have nothing to do with mine, I also just like to hear people talk about their set ups. Please? 🌞


Currently running OPNsense on a small Dual-Nic Shuttle PC with an Pentium G4560 and 4 gigs of ram and it’s been handling everything I throw at it perfectly fine. Ive got 16 Interfaces, around 10 Wireguard Peers and a SIT tunnel to HE and Im still getting Line Speeds through the firewall.
I might be able to snag that same model with an i5-6500 for around 60€. Could you tell me more about your experience with it? In particular, how are the thermals and the power consumption, can it handle 1Gb/s on both ethernet ports, and have you encountered any compatibility issues with OPNsense?
I’ve never gotten DIY routers including opnsense to give gigabit line speeds once VLANs are enabled.