Having got my Raspberry Pi for Christmas, I was finally able to enter the world of home labs and I’m slowly getting everything up and running.

That said, one thing I was super excited about but hasn’t come to fruition was Pi-Hole. That’s for two reasons, one my Pi isn’t hardwired into the router and two my router kinda sucks (Virgin Media Hub 5).

So I came here to ask for recommendations for a router. One that would allow me to run vLANs and use my Pi for adblocking. Honestly the advice I got was like fire and I was like water.

I wanted a simple cheap solution and everyone was like just spend 🥺

Eventually though, my ignorance waned and I started looking into what the suggestions were, which was essentially buy an N100 Firewall Mini PC with 4 Ethernet Port, load up PFSense or OpenWRT, then buy an Access Point, connect it and profit.

So with my dreams of a £50 plug and play experience down the drain, can someone explain to me how it all works? Why is this the suggestion? My Pi is kinda set and leave. My NAS is set and leave, will a firewall PC be the same? Also why a firewall PC over a second Pi?

  • sabreW4K3@lemmy.tfOPEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    You don’t know how much I’ve treasured this post and I couldn’t reply as I had it sitting in my inbox so I could find it easily. But thank you so much. I’m trying to go route two so I can run my IOT stuff on a VLAN.

    • its_me_gb
      2·
      10 months ago

      I’m glad it helped! As i said, it was all from memory and was a good few years ago, so hopefully it all still applies!