What hardware would you recommend for AP’s and dedicated Firewalls? I really value open-source so bonus points if it works without blobs or the hardware is open or has available schematics.
Altough a bit expensive I have looked at Protectli firewalls as an option as the option to run OPNsense and coreboot is attractive.
For an AP, the Banana PI BPI-R3 (R4 if I’m patient) sounds interesting being open hardware and supporting OpenWRT. I am however curious on if it would run on LibreCMC.
I have a Protectli box running OPNSense and it’s been great once I figured out how to get its implementation of unbound working with my Pihole.
And they can even use coreboot supposedly, but I haven’t had the butthole to flash it.
Also, ditch pihole for blocky. It’s faster and uses less RAM, and is far less complex. And it will run right on FreeBSD, no separate machine required. Couple it with prometheus and grafana and you even get pretty graphs just like pihole.
A $70 box off ebay will run opnsense quite well. Put in a cheap network card for the extra ports.
For APs you can buy routers that are supported by OpenWRT and flash them, I doubt a BPI-R3 would have acceptable performance as an AP.
Are there open source APs? I was under the impression that everything required binary firmware (even if running something like OpenWrt).
Well If it did I don’t think LibreCMC would be much of a thing. (Linux-Libre OpenWRT to sum it up). But the officially supported hardware seems to be ThinkPenguin, and old APs which isn’t a very rich selection. Unfortunate but thats why I wondered if the Banana Pi would work since firmware is closely tied to hardware.
Oh wow, I’d never hear of Protectli until now and I’m really intrigued. They have a 4 port that looks absolutely perfect! Thanks!
