I am a dumb ass with a BA in the social sciences not computer science, but I was able to get a vanilla OpenWRT installed on a Flint 2 firewall. Sure I did a lot of reading, youtubing, and got a little AI help. The Flint 2 comes with OpenWRT installed on it but everything I read suggested putting a clean install.

I had a slow start to home labbing I started with one pihole than moved to two, than I thought about getting a VPN running but that did not really work I believe I even tried using duckDNS for that but than I did the dumbest thing anyone can do I opened port 22 in my firewall so that I could SSH in. When my internet mystiralisly stopped working correctly I called up my ISP and wow did I ever learn that opening port 22 was a bad idea for how I had it set up at the time. So that stopped me exploring homelabbing for a while, sure after I had new pi installs set up it was never project after project but I never used port 22 again (until recently now that I have crowdsec running) and never used passwordless login. But earlier this year my place flooded and I was out of my home more frequently so I needed to find a way that I could access my pihole and smb (I had given up on using nextcloud at that point but I think I am coming back around to it), so came the Flint 2. With OpenWRT the 3 or 4 projects turned into an infinite number of possibilities.