Your Router Sucks. Build Your Own Instead!

Did you know that you can build your own router that can perform better than off-the-shelf products? It’s easier than you might think to build your own opnSense or pfSense router, and we’ll show you how!

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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
0:45 The problem with ISP Routers
1:26 What hardware do I need?
3:37 How about software?
4:01 Installing and configuring opnSense
6:01 DHCP settings
6:34 Updating your system
6:44 Changing interface assignments and other settings
7:06 Thanks Bitdefender for sponsoring!
8:12 Why do I need a switch?
9:01 The last thing we need: Wi-Fi
9:45 Lets run a speed test!
10:29 Power efficiency options
10:59 Conclusion

[MasterLemon]

we want an entire definitive series about network, switches, router, access points, servers, racks, everything. Kinda like the "How to build a Network, the last guide you'll ever need!"

[imitt]

I would love to see one of these concepts built out of a rack-mount server. You can get fairly cheap 1U multiport switches that run at guaranteed gigabit speeds, and racks make everything tidier.

[niceatrya]

As a tech director for a school district, I had the lucky privilege of our big name firewall/router dying on a Friday afternoon. There was no way I was getting a replacement before Monday morning when staff and students arrived. pfSense saved the day with old on hand hardware, and haven’t gone back since. I easily built a cold spare for “just-in-case” purposes.

[TheMxChannel]

What always puzzled me is that every provider says how much they care about their customer. But no one delivers a good router out of the box.

[tclark]

I did this years ago before the age of cheap home routers. Loaded RH Linux and used the Router HowTo to set up the SW. It worked great for years but, honestly, better options came along and were actually cheaper. You can do tons of stuff with a PC based router, but most of us don't really need that.

[newbietuber]

really appreciate including the idle wattage and providing power efficient alternatives. Hoping to see power efficiency become a more common talking point in future videos

[NightWolfx]

Mikrotik has some decent 10gbe options too. Also, remember there are the low power / S / T (like the 4770 is an 84w TDP, the 4770S is 65w, and the 4770T is 45w TDP) type intel chips for some of these machines that have a lower base clock with the same boost, they will save some extra power when idle.

[sjoervanderploeg]

Please, if you make a video like this in the future... show viewers how they can setup separated networks (VLAN) for their network. For example having all IoT or "smart" devices on their own separated network? One of the basic security precautions one would take by setting up a router this way!

[JamesScholesUK]

Really appreciate you putting the idle wattage in at the end. Fancy doing a "DIY NAS vs dedicated" video looking at power consumption vs outlay/expandability too? Bonus points for talking about whether shutting a NAS down overnight to save power is going to result in b0rked harddrives

[jeremyokeeffe]

I would highly recommend selecting ZFS, not UFS. A simple power outage easily causes filesystem corruption on UFS. The increase in memory usage of ZFS is 100% worth the reliability.

[scottgardner]

I put my serial connector away a few years ago, but i still love this type of video. Thanks!

[danlab]

An important note on 10gb nics: The x540-t2 NIC recommended here doesn't support 2.5gb or 5gb links. It appears most ISPs offering faster than gigabit are using 5gb links from their router/modem so you need a NIC that supports that.

The recommendation for a while has been x550-t2 based cards but those have almost doubled in price in the last year.

[urmomsahoe]

I would really love a separate channel dedicated to home projects that have to do with tech. I would love to get into 3d printing but find it hard to spend the money needed to get a decent long term setup. The main reason being there aren't that many youtubers focusing on 3d printing tips/upgrades. As well as full comprehensive guides from unboxing to complete setup with upgrade instillation. Its also a credibility thing, I trust you guys to do the proper research and validate necessity for upgrade parts Etc. I'm also very into SDR stuff and although it is a bit more of a niche topic it has plenty of really interesting content to be had and frankly if you guys stuck your heads in the space it might breath new life into some of the currently available SDR software as some of it is pretty outdated/doesn't have regular updates. I'm sure there's other hobby areas that you could explore. Maybe you could start it as a once a month video where a few people from LMG get together and explore some of their hobbies in a more channel super fun format instead of the more professional LTT format. Or start them out as written guides and transfer them to video guides after you gauge popularity.

[hikaru-live]

Also, if you used a reasonably modern, non-mini PC for the router, and you have the know-how, you can virtualize the rig and make it do more than just the router. One of the VMs would be the router, and you can have other tasks like NAS, game server, even your blog hosted on the single box.

[MisterRorschach]

I’ve always wanted to do this just to do it. There have been so many times I’ll randomly come across a board with insane amounts of ethernet connectivity built in, and that or a switch is the first thing that comes to mind. There’s just something about knowing you have the fastest router possible.

[zacharyharwell]

I would LOVE another separate video on this topic; maybe something like the live builds Linus does on occasion so we can follow/build along. I'm done and over with the internet issues we keep having and I myself would love something like that to help in the short term while I am learning/improving similar ideas for the future

[jadnb]

As a German, I am pretty proud that they decided to use the German power price as an example for expensive power 😂

[AndreiKucharavy]

Really enjoying this kind of videos coming back to LTT - tbh was missing them as LTT shifted away from their 2015-2016 content.

[lukewoodside]

I would definitely use a Protectli vault if you are going down this route. Unless you need fibre networking, then you would be talking spf cards in a poweredge server.

Also, as for opensense vs pfsense, opensense uses hardenedBSD, which is a bit better in terms of security. As for serial, it is generally used for embedded devices or devices with no video output for anyone wondering. (An example would be cisco routers)

[Cowclops]

Advanced mode: Install pfsense on an intel nuc, then use vlans to separate wan and lan.

its a LOT easier to have one interface for wan and one interface for lan, but its totally possible to build a router with a single nic.