this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
55 points (95.1% liked)

Selfhosted

40296 readers
220 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I have been exploring the world of home servers/self-hosting for a little over a year now, and feel like I have at a decent understanding of a lot of things that go into this. The one thing I am not remotely comfortable with yet is networking. It's like a foreign language to me.

What are some good resources or projects that I could work on to help me develop a better understanding of this? Or, what helped you advance your networking knowledge? I have an UnRaid machine and a Raspberry Pi 4 (8gb) at my disposal (for any project recommendations). Current router is ISP provided, so nothing fancy.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Well, how much wifi and open-source do you really want?

If you are willing to go with commercial hardware + OpenWRT you might want to check the table of hardware at https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi and https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864_ac-wifi. Solid picks for the future might be the Netgear WAX2* line (no USB), the GL.iNet GL-MT6000, ASUS RT-AX59U, Belkin RT1800, Belkin RT3200, Linksys E7350, Linksys E8450. If you don’t mind having older wifi a Netgear R7800 is solid.

For a full open-source hardware and software experience you need a more exotic brand like this https://www.banana-pi.org/en/bananapi-router/. The BananaPi BPi R3 and here is a very good option with a 4 core CPU, 2GB of RAM Wifi6 and two 2.5G SFP ports besides the 4 ethernet ports. There’s also an upcoming board the BPI-R4 with optional Wifi 7 and 10G SPF.

Side note: while there are things like OPNsense and pfSense that may make sense in some cases you most likely don't require that. You've a small network and OpenWRT will provide you with a much cleaner open-source experience and also allow for all the customization you would like. Another great advantage of OpenWRT is that with a great router like the BananaPi BPi R3 you've the ability to install 3rd party stuff in your router, you may even use qemu to virtualize stuff like your Pi-Hole on it or simply run docker containers.