For a while I have been planning to switch from an all-in-one wifi router to having separate devices because that way they can be upgraded piece by piece instead of having to replace the whole thing.
I am confused about the role of the firewall.
If I have a router running OpenWRT, does it have a firewall included? Either by default or by installing certain packages?
Or is it required to have a separate firewall running opnsense/pfsense?
If not required, what would be the benefits that would lean in favour of separate firewall?
use case: small home network 2-3 users. some internal self hosting and maybe one day external self hosting.
ETA: The best internet I could subscribe to where I’m at is 1024 Mbps down, 50 Mbps up. So don’t worry about wasting fibre speeds. :(
My assembled components so far are: router, WAPs, switches, ethernet cable and cable modem.
Thanks for any advice.
You might see a 10% performance hit with gigabit internet depending on what you enable in openwrt and how fast your hardware is. On the other hand I wouldn’t compare openwrt speed against the advertised speed. Test the actual speed you get by plugging your computer directly into your modem.
I mean I don’t want to take a 90% performance hit lol. I can def live with 10% hit.
My bad. Yeah, you’ll be fine. On the other hand, if you want to spend hundreds/thousands of $$ on network and server hardware, that’s also an option ;)
TODO