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?
I run a Unifi USG-1 router/gateway now but before that I got a used AC1000 router from the thrift store for $5 and loaded OpenWRT on that. I eventually got an Aris modem to replace the Comcrap Gateway because it was messing with the DNS traffic, even when piHole was set as DNS for every machine. So if I were you I would go look at the OpenWRT list of units that will accept their firmware. Pay attention to the hardware revision as well as the model number, it matters.
https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_fwdownload
Then head over to a local thrift store or two and see if you can find any for cheep.
I've been looking at a bunch of different SBCs that can run OpenWRT because I really want that minimal power draw, but there's so many more that are x86