PLMer: New firewall/router at home

I used to be a big fan of Linksys home router. it's a pretty neat small device with all the features you would need for home use. I owned nearly 10 Linksys devides in the past 5 years. As I'm getting more and more devices at home and now I feel they are pretty weak and slow. You won't feel it if you only have a phone and two laptops, I just got too much (~30) devices that need network connection, including few Kodi streaming set-top boxes. DD-WRT gives more capabilities but it's still on the same weak hardware, and really it's more like a hacked OS and not 100% reliable.

I started looking at a custom home Firewall/Router build few months back and finally I get one configured recently. I ordered a Supermicro X10SBA motherboard with Celeron J19000 (SoC) processor. Dual intel Gigal ethernet ports make it perfect to meet this need, and most importantly it's lower power consumption (10W TWP) and overall idle power is about 20 -30 W. I put it in a Antec 110 USFF with VESA mount adapter so you can mount it on the wall.

For Operating system - I tried few. from Vyos to pfSense. Vyos is a Cli interface and make you feel more like managing a Cisco switch. pfSense provided a pretty comprehensive web GUI and you can basically configure everything without needing any cli. You wouldn't go wrong with either option, depends on what interface you would prefer.. but due to learning curve to get familiarized to either one I finally decided to just put a Linux OS in there. I have been a Linux user and administrator since 90's so I think I can just configure some of the simple stuff to meet my needs, i.e. Router, Firewall, Apache virtual host, VPN server also what I will use most is the SSH tunneling from office to bypass the new proxy that company deployed. everybody hates it the Z*ler thing.

I like Debian/Ubuntu flavored Linux distribution very much, so I put Ubuntu server eventually just to get things in place quickly, and it works perfectly so far.

Performance wise - I have a 100/20 Mb Fioptics at home and I used to get only 3 - 5 MBps over VPN/SSH-Tunneling. I also have a VPN setup on Raspberry Pi 2 B+ and I get a little higher rate but pretty similar. But on my new server I can get more than 20 Mbps most of the time :)

So now, all my previous WiFi Routers become AP only. so without doing routing stuff I hope they can perform better. I'm also looking at some new WIFI AP, UniFi or another Linksys AP I can just mount on my ceiling. This isn't immediate needs as I use Giga ethernet most of the time when I work from home, also my Wireless-N WiFI is pretty much maxed out my Fipotics line (100/20 Mbps).

Now I'm a even happier man. I've got new NAS and now the new Firewall/Router.. what should I look at next hmm...

HW Spec: