Hey guys! I'm upgrading to a Gigabit cable internet connection soon (I just need a tech to come out here and fix my signal that's pretty whack apparently). But to that end, I was starting to look at what's available with regards to routers. The stuff from Netgear (their Nighthawk series) is getting pretty expensive, so I decided to see what other options are there. Then I randomly ran into folks using micro PCs and running router / firewall software on them and it has me quite intrigued... Anyone ever run a pfSense Home Router set up? 6 Reasons to Use a pfSense Home Router - HomeTechHacker I do like the security features mentioned in the article (1. Advanced security). Thinking of spending ~$350 on a self contained Quad Core Celeron, running pfSense on it and using my existing router as a wireless AP (with a eye to running mesh access points down the road).
High up on the list of things that I thought that I'd never run: a FreeBSD based solution (and yes, I didn't exactly use or install squat - it came preloaded haha). Instead of going with pfSense, I decided to go with a fork of it - OPNsense. Ultimately, the better UI and more frequent updates won me over. Documentation is pretty good, but not as plentiful as pfSense. I chose to go with a Protectly FW4B: FW4B - 4 Port Intel ® J3160 - Protectli I spec'd it out with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, a 120GB Kingston SSD, and chose that it come with coreboot (opensource lightweight BIOS) and OPNsense. It's currently running "headless" and I'm able to log into it via GUI from my laptop that's in my home network. Pics of the hardware are here.
And for anyone considering trying this out, OPNsense has a good user guide: Welcome to OPNsense’s documentation! — OPNsense documentation