A bit of context before I get to the meat of this project: placeholder link
Part 1: The catalyst
While I liked my netgear router for its simplicity and speed, I lacked total control over it. If I want my router to do whatever I wanted, I needed to make my own. But I didn’t even know how to start with building one. Then I found the software component: OPNsense. An open source routing/firewall OS that offered more control than I could have ever hoped for. Plus vlan support on the router side was plus since my “smart” switch was pretty dumb. From there, I just needed to figure out the hardware I needed for this project.
Part 2: Getting closer
I eventually settled on using a Dell Optiplex 9010 as the base of my new router. I didn’t choose it because it was fast, I chose it mainly due to the budgetary constraints that come with being a college student. Even if it wasn’t the best choice I could have made, I was determined to make it work. So the next order business was to get some more Ethernet ports on it. I decided to use a dual 1 GiB expansion card to make to Vlans. I could have used a 2.5 or even a 10 GiB card but I didn’t have the need for either of those at the time. With the hardware set, so began the process of putting software and hardware together.
Part 3: Wait, this works?!
Installing OPNsense was easy, configuring it without any experience, was not. I never thought that configuring rules for port forwarding and vlans would be so difficult to understand. But once I unraveled the mystery behind vlans and how they work it became very easy to finish. Once the switch was configured to use the vlan tags I set and my netgear router set in AP mode, it was time to test it! Not only did work, it worked way better than I ever expected it to! 500 gigs down over wireless! The router provided by Spectrum could hit 350 on a good day, which is terrible considering my family pays for 500! Now I always knew this would happen, seeing as the internet provider routers are absolute dogwater. But actually seeing the results first hand was pretty shocking to see how badly they perform.
With this setup, I moved to trying other things, which I will talk about later.