My Homelab currently consists of 3 Mini PC’s and will eventually be put in a 10" rack
They are all just plugged into the router my ISP provided, I’d like to get a new router that runs open-source software and create a new network from it. I have no idea where to begin.
What hardware would you recommend?
Bonus: If possible I’d like to in the future attach a sim card to my network as a backup for the occasion that the ISP connection drops. (just a nice to have)
I started with pfsense on Virtualbox, then quickly moved that to HyperV on Windows, where I had 3 locations running this as their routers for almost 2 years, even through COVID when I couldn’t get to some locations. I never had a single issue, just got annoyed at the constant Windows updates rebooting the systems and internet going down when it did. One of these sites ran over a 4G modem, that I connected to a VPS that I could tunnel down to access it remotely.
I then moved these sites to Untangle, still on Hyper V, then for own use, moved off VM onto baremetal on an HP Elitedesk 800 with 10GbE card that cost about £100 total, which ran wonderfully until Untangle got sold out and made me switch to…
…OPNSense on the same Elitedesk (after reading about PFSenses silly games they played), and this ran perfectly for about 18 months, and with solid 1Gbps on Wireguard, then after all these years of messing with routers, I finally switched to a Unifi UDM Pro SE last year and I couldn’t be happier. It does all I need, plus also CCTV recording (away from Blue Iris). I no longer have to worry that my DIY routers are going to fail on me. The other sites moved to ISP supplied modem/routers.
So, I would recommend Unifi hardware, despite it not being open source, mainly because, well, internet is a crucial service, especially in my household. And the UDM does WAN fail over well with my backup 4G modem. I can get it to do anything I need it to by just studying the GUI, I don’t need to read loads of info like I did with OPnSense etc.
I did once however, move from PFSense to Untangle on a remote machine. Because Untangle had a GUI, I fired up a VM on the same Windows machine as PFSense, set it all up with the same NIC settings, then adjusted Hyper V so that the Untangle VM booted and the PfSense one didn’t, then rebooted the machine and waited nervously for a few minutes, then boom, up popped the Untangle router! It felt good getting that done. It was only at my parents house, but still, it required a 90min journey if it failed.
With all the drama of Windows 11 in recent years, I’m glad I switched away from HyperV when I did.