First, a hardware question. I’m looking for a computer to use as a… router? Louis calls it a router but it’s a computer that is upstream of my whole network and has two ethernet ports. And suggestions on this? Ideal amount or RAM? Ideal processor/speed? I have fiber internet, 10 gbps up and 10 gbps down, so I’m willing to spend a little more on higher bandwidth components. I’m assuming I won’t need a GPU.
Anyways, has anyone had a chance to look at his guide? It’s accompanied by two youtube videos that are about 7 hours each.
I don’t expect to do everything in his guide. I’d like to be able to VPN into my home network and SSH into some of my projects, use Immich, check out Plex or similar, and set up a NAS. Maybe other stuff after that but those are my main interests.
Any advice/links for a beginner are more than welcome.
Edit: thanks for all the info, lots of good stuff here. OpenWRT seems to be the most frequently recommended thing here so I’m looking into that now. Unfortunately my current router/AP (Asus AX6600) is not supported. I was hoping to not have to replace it, it was kinda pricey, I got it when I upgraded to fiber since it can do 6.6gbps. I’m currently looking into devices I can put upstream of my current hardware but I might have to bite the bullet and replace it.
Edit 2: This is looking pretty good right now.
I would not look at his guide. If you’ve watched any of Louis’ videos, you already know this guy is a ranting machine. He can go on and on for hours about things. I watched about 15 minutes of his rambling and realized he had gotten basically nowhere. It’s also one of the more complex ways of doing things. Use ZimaOS to get started with the easy button.
Stick with whatever router you have, for starters. You can upgrade later. You don’t necessarily need that at all.
For the actual server I highly recommend this guy. N100 is very common due to being very inexpensive and efficient. You’ll have to add RAM and an SSDs but you probably want to choose exactly how large that is anyway. It has 4xNVMe and 2xSATA, if you decide you want to expand later.
I voluntarily subject myself to his rants on youtube. That server is very close to what I’m looking for. Something that can do 10 gbps would be ideal. Just today I came across this. Seems pretty good but going to keep looking.
Just glancing through that guide:
OPNsense instead of Pfsense, because pfsense is going to rugpull, it’s just a matter of time. I wouldn’t trust the twats that run it farther than I could throw them because they’re pretty silly people. Rossman suggests exactly this in the intro to the router section, he would change if he hadn’t been using it for a decade already. Unfortunately, a lot of this guide is focussed on how to do it via pfsense and if you’re brand new, you’re going to have to figure out how to do it in OPNsense yourself.
Wireguard/Tailscale instead of openvpn. Faster and way easier to set up. Don’t even try to set up a full LAN routed VPN, just use Tailscale for the services you want. And use it for everything and everyone instead of punching holes in the firewall.
He’s definitely right about mailcow; if you’re reading that guide for information, you are not a person that should be self-hosting email.
Start off small, get an old PC that has an i5or better that’s got vt-d support. start off with 8gb of RAM or more. Then throw proxmox on it and you are off to the races. It will save you a lot of money since you can run multiple virtual machines or lxc containers. This is how I started out, my proxmox host now has 26gb of RAM and its running very smoothly . i like opnsense as a router and firewall but its a little advanced but amazing, also get an access point and a switch and you can start building your network. You could also even run opnsense in a VM but that gets a little confusing but its an option.
TLDR, the developers of pfSense are not the nicest people sometimes. If this bothers you, consider checking out OPNsense.
So first the author is arguing around on the router section that you should not buy a cheap router but then goes for pfsense instead of opnsense, i understand that when you are used to pfsense that you may not want to switch but recommending it for new ppl is just stupid. They have shown their hostality against their OS community in the past see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13615896
When I first started self hosting in 2018 I didn’t know about how PFsense handled themselves and got a netgate appliance and used it up until 2 years ago and it ran great. Not a bad recommendation by any means but also understand expectations and opinions shift.
There’s a million ways to do anything when self hosting, so I’ll just talk about what I have and if you interested just reply.
I only host a few services for now: Invidious, CloudTube, Redlib, FreshRSS. All of them as docker containers, this helps in quickly updating them and isolating their configurations. I have a few TB of disk space on the server itself that I can access through SMB3 shares, so I don’t have a proper NAS yet. Probably will do so at some point when I need it.
As for hardware, I’m using an HP mini-pc with
- Ryzen 5 PRO 3400GE
- 16GB DDR4
- 256GB boot drive (NVME), 2TB storage drive (HDD)
This mini-pc can literally be opened by removing 1 screw, so hardware changes/cleaning can’t get easier. I installed Debian on it
As for remote access, I use twingate instead of self-hosted wireguard. Mostly because I’m using my ISPs router and they like to reset it whenever they want. I’m also not confortable opening ports on the router. Twingate covers my use case completely so I never went back to this. I can map a custom domain to the server’s IP and this meant I just switch on twingate when I’m out and can access it seamlessly.
This guide seems pretty dated in terms of technologies and approaches used so I wouldn’t follow it 100%.
And it is heavily opinionated, without pointing out other solutions like for example the use of openvpn without mentioning wireguard even once.
I purchased a firewall appliance with 4 ports and installed opnsense on it. Best decision of my self-hosted life.
Get one with two 10gbps ports and you are set. Passive cooled, small factor, Intel atom CPU. 4gb ram is plentiful.
On aliexpress can be found for 100€ or little more.
Even much better than an OpenWRT, which I love and use but delegate to internal network (WiFi access points) rather than perimetral defense.
Just kinda flipped through his guide. It’s a bit dated on knowledge and techniques, even for beginners.
You don’t need a computer for a router. Get a router that ships with OpenWRT and start there. GL.iNet makes good and affordable stuff. Use that for your ad blocking, VPN, and so on to get started.
I’d just skip OpenVPN altogether and get started with Wireguard or Headscale/Tailscale.
If you want to run other heavier services, start out with a low-power minipc until you’re settled on what your needs or limitations are. You can get a very capable AMD minipc for $250-300, or an n100 low-power for a bit cheaper. Check out Minisforum units for this. Reliable, good price, and solid warranty.
If you deal in heavy storage, maybe consider adding a NAS to the mix, but maybe that’s a further steps. OpenWRT is a good starting point just to get your basic network services and remote access up, then just move on from there.
A good and fun starting point for some people is setting up Home Assistant on a minipc or Raspberry Pi (honestly, the costs of Pi boards now is insane. Might be good just to get the minipc).
First, thanks everyone for all the info, glad I posted. It’s a lot to go through.
OpenWRT is the most frequently recommended thing here, and my router is not supported. I somewhat recently purchased my router (Asus AX6600) when I switched to fiber due to its high bandwidth and I’d prefer to not replace it. I’ll look around and see what options I have for putting a separate device upstream of my current hardware and if that doesn’t work out then maybe I’ll replace my current router.
I see that you can install openwrt on a switch. Would it make sense to put a switch with openwrt upstream of my current router/AP?
Edit: dang there’s only 1 switch supported by openwrt that has 10 gbps ports (ZyXEL XGS1250-12)
You can install OpenWRT on tons of hardware, or any generic PC. I’d suggest that over *sense distros any day because it’s just more user friendly.
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You can certainly build a box for for use as a router, but you don’t need to.
If your not planning to build out anything public facing and aren’t going to run ipv6 internally, you can use any router to block all inbound ports and run everything over wire guard or tailscale.
There are a million and one ways to self host services. First question needs to be, what do you want to do and why. That will dictate the how.
