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 dont know much about your router/ap, but from some light googling the virgin media hub 5 has 2.5gb/s ethernet and wifi 6 which should be fairly decent. I agree with what most comments are saying about connecting the pi using ethernet ("hardwiring" it) and setting a static ip. The raspberry pi image flasher even has an option for that in the advanced settings if I'm not mistaken. If youre worried about not being able to plug a keyboard/mouse and monitor to the pi look at ssh. If you arnt comfortable with command line/terminal I cant say I'd recommend setting up your own router/firewall.
If you dont have any ethernet ports available on your router then looking at a good switch for 2.5 gbps might be a better bet, I always perfer physical connections to wifi.
If you do want to jump down the rabbit hole of pfsense/opnsense/openwrt then hit ebay and look for a cheap workstation and an intel nic, that will get you started messing about with it. Be sure to do research about power consumption of the device youre getting, the raspberry pis sip power but beefier machines will suck some power and might show up on your electricity bill.
I use opnsense, the forums are a good place to look at hardware that you might want to gravitate towards, intel nics have been my best bet but there are plenty of resources to tell you what is compatible and what isnt with openbsd.
OPNSense seems to be where everyone ends up eventually. Which surprises me given that it's so overwhelmingly x86 and as you say, the power consumption can be like glugging.