With my Raspberry Pi basically being software/service complete, I’m starting to think more about my router and I need to make sure I’m thinking about this right.
As I envision it, my router would run OpenWRT, Pi-Hole and a VPN. Is that correct or have I got this wrong?
I can only tell you what I use. Obviously, the first thing I did was put my modem in bridged mode. I attached a router/firewall (in my case a sonicwall, but anything is fine, as long as it’s not found at the local best buy); a few switches, access points, and two raspberry pi’s running… Bind.
Yep, I don’t use pihole. I don’t see the point. I have Adblock on my browser, where I can set it to run, or not run, as I see fit.
I’m going Max performance here, the firewall is running in an optimized spi mode, QoS enabled, the whole nine yards. One of the pi’s runs DHCP, the pair run bind for DNS forwarding and caching out to Google’s public DNS servers… The whole system is ripping fast. at least for response times. Bandwidth… Well, I blame my ISP for that.
If I were to recommend something similar to someone else, the things I would change are my WiFi and switch selection, I’m using all Cisco products, which most people don’t want to deal with that complexity. I can’t blame them; and ubiquiti is a good substitute.
For the firewall, I’d usually recommend opnsense.
And I’m pretty solid on recommending the pi’s, with bind. I’m sure pihole is nice, but bluntly, I just want my DNS to do DNS things. Let everything else worry about the rest.