Now that I have time for hobbies again I wanna dive right in to building up a home lab. Right now I just have a Netgear router that reached end of life, and a NAS i’d like to make accessible remotely, and a DIY router seems like the correct next step for me. I’m very interested in ad-blocking network wide and someday I’d like to host my own little webpage, but for now I’m really just barely getting started.
I’m information gathering, I don’t know what I don’t know and my networking skills are pretty weak anyway. But even if your needs and desires have nothing to do with mine, I also just like to hear people talk about their set ups. Please? 🌞


A used Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny M720q mini PC, with the PCIe riser and an Intel chipset (Huawei) dual-10 Gbit NIC, running a pretty basic install of OpenWrt. Has no issue with 10 Gbit throughput, maxes out at about maybe 12 Gbit if you do a full duplex test, which I think may be a limitation of the limited PCIe lanes in the riser.
I got 10 Gbit internet at home, looked at the prices of 10 Gbit routers and noted right out! Built this for maybe $100 in stuff off of auctions.