Was rather shocked to find BT hubs don’t allow you to change DNS servers anymore and force you to use their own ones, so I can’t properly setup adguard.
What routers are people using now that are reliable and will let me control my own network configuration
Check out the OpenWRT Table of Hardware, it has a list of firmware mod-able off the shelf WiFi routers that work with, you guessed it, OpenWRT. It’s rather versatile as it’s Linux based and can handle VLANs, multiple SSIDs, and of course, you can change the DNS servers.
Opnsense or openwrt devices.
What I did is I bought a cheap small PC with an Intel chip (i5), some RAM and an SSD. You can find these with more than one NIC pretty easily from Amazon, and they are just normal computers: only small and quiet. Then go with a virtualization platform such as Proxmox, and to that, install opnSense as the router distribution and use the rest of the processing power to run everything else in your house in virtual machines: Home Assistant, media server, you name it… Just search Amazon with something like “router pc” and you get a long list of machines below and over 200 euros that are more than enough for your home. Computers like this one.
The great thing about opnSense is how it gets regular updates. And when you use a normal PC as your router, you run the latest FreeBSD kernel and get updates basically as long as opnSense is developed.
You probably also want a Wi-Fi. These boxes usually miss it, and even when they have a Wi-Fi card, opnSense is not really great for setting wireless networks. I just bought a few APs from Ubiquiti. They are a bit on the expensive side, but I just don’t need to touch these things after setting them up and the network never fails on me. There are also much cheaper APs in the market, just get anything that fits to your budget and plug it to the router.
I did this for a while, but decided to just run opnsense on bare metal, I didn’t want my whole network going down if I had to restart Proxmox or something. It’s way overkill but it’s running opnsense, adguard and will soon be running ngnix hopefully.
I use pfsense on my own metal. I can recommend it- never caused me any issues in the 4 years I’ve been using it, now. Even seamlessly updated major version twice.
Lot of good choices:
One of the 4 port atom pcs on Amazon, or even one of the arm ones, the key is ethernet ports and remember you’ll need to handle your wifi. Put debian, pfsense, openwrt, whatever you like, it’ll be great.
One of the openwrt systems, a high end glinet isn’t bad, just any of the better ones.
Had a freebsd server that run a vnet jail for routing, was glorious, no notes, jut perfect.
Running a unifi dream machine se right now, mostly because I want someone else to handle security (I know it’s not much, I just don’t have any bandwidth for that now). Works fine, but I’m using unifi wifi so it’s a tie-in there.
If you want a retail system, either openwrt or unifi, I know why people have issues with ubiquiti, but it’s probably the best prosumer hardware and software you can get without using your own. I haven’t used pfsense much, maybe that would change my mind.
