Selfhosted

Furthermore, how do you go about running cables in your home?

You watch some Youtube videos about how to do it and then you follow the instructions.

It's going to depend a lot on the construction details of your house:

• Do you have wooden framing (common in the US), masonry (common in Europe, as I understand it), or something else?
• Do you have access to an attic or basement/crawlspace?
• Do you need to run wires on exterior walls (which means dealing with insulation), or just interior ones?

For me (wooden frame construction, accessible attic and basement), I didn't find it to be too difficult. Is it work? Yeah, of course. But it's not that bad, and I recommend spending the effort because having proper wall plates wtih in-wall wires is way nicer than having stuff snaking along surfaces.

Look at protectli, there are equivalent devices on aliexpress if too expensive. If you're particular about open source, try finding ones with openboot.

Use a PoE switch, or a power injector for AP. If open source, OpenWRT APs.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

[Thread #138 for this comm, first seen 6th Mar 2026, 11:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I would go with the separate AP route unless your firewall device is conveniently located and want to add a wireless card to whatever firewall box. You'll need something new for wireless anyway once you plop the firewall in front of the modem.

Used enterprise APs can be good value. Unifi is super easy, reasonably priced, and you can run the controller/management thing as a container on your proxmox for localamagemrnt. Then probably ly anything supported by OpenWRT you can find cheap. Their hardware db might be helpful for comparing models/features in general.

Power for AP can use a poe injector at the switch or AP side of the run. Or whatever power adapter (many "APs" still have some DC power).

Cable runs along baseboards is fine. You can get cable channels and have it look super neat. Way cheaper, there's little nail in cable rings for exactly that too. Pick a cable color that matches, or paint the channels. If there's decent coax run all over the house, you could do adapters to avoid a cabling job.

Some random (GMKtek?) N100 dual nic thing runs my opnSense (VM on proxmox) at 1Gbps throughout, through I have minimal filtering applied now. I haven't tested wireguard/VPN throughput or anything heavy though.

Switch you need anything managed for the VLANs. "Smart" or "Lite" I think get thrown around a lot too for basic managed. If you're into labbing, again the used business/enterprise can get any range of features. Just have to deal with the noise/power/heat.

Edit: run pihole or adguard home as a container, then have that as the dns given by the current router/dhcp. Should help with filtering until you have something in-line.

PC prices are crazy right now, but if you can find a used Lenovo ThinkCentre, I'd go for that.

I'm running an m720q and it's neat because you can get a riser board and install an extra PCIe NIC of your choosing.

If you don't want to go that route try to find a mini PC with 2 intel NICs, since they're historically the most reliable and well supported.

Depending on the firestick you may be able to jailbreak it.

@Imaginary_Stand4909

If you're gonna dedicate the hardware to OPNSense or any other router software, then get something not too expensive. A Raspberry Pi 4 can route and traffic shape a gigabit without breaking a sweat, so you don't need much mini PC just to do routing. N150, N100, N95, or whatever are fine.

If you want to combine functions, running something like Proxmox and putting OPNSense on a VM, then get yourself something more capable, Ryzen 5 or 7 7000 series maybe, 16 GB of RAM