Doing the lords work! 🫶

A hardware firewall generally indicates a standalone appliance that is dedicated to being a firewall. Not to be confused with a software firewall as you would see with UFW, or Windows Defender. Modern routers do possess some of the same tenets of a hardware firewall, but a dedicated hardware firewall usually gives a broader range of defenses such as IDS/IPS, filtering, etc.

I have a dedicated hardware firewall in the form of pFsense. The 'black box' in OP's picture is the hardware firewall.

Even the wrong non-isp routers are ridiculous compared to OpenWrt capable ones. You're telling me I'm paying a huge premium to get a cutting edge Nighthawk, and then they shove a subscription service in my face to use any of these features? Let alone the security implications of having all your traffic routed through proprietary software. No thank you.

I always get my isp outers as pass through so network is controlled by my entry. I have never bothered doing much with it but it's nice to have the option.

I used to use a ddwrt firmware for years but eventually my hardware could never keep up with my net speeds and manufacture firmware was faster. Trying an Omada network now seems alright but haven't added their wifi.

Will have a look, thanks!

I’m running on bare metal. I have a physical homelab behind. Can’t you add ram?

Personal preference, it’s what I’ve been using since I started my homelab and I think it works well enough.

I just got it, it’s only being used as an access point so can’t really say about all their features.

At the moment I only have one WiFi instance, not planning to separate yet but it could be a future upgrade since I have a few IoT devices.

I considered suricata but for now I think crowdsec works well enough, I’ll see later if I think suricata could be more useful

You want pictures and stats of what?