Time to get serious about my router

[zeeclor]

@jdownie

It seems that Draytek are an Australian manufacturer and they make commercial grade gear instead of the consumer grade stuff that i’ve been using until now. Is that a fair assessment? Any other suggestions for me to consider before i start buying stuff?

Draytek (website) is Taiwanese. They have good support in Australia and England.

@Kangie

You can probably get sufficient performance out of some sort of Mini PC; something like this guy from Ali would be sufficient for firewalling, routing, and running all of the fun services that you want in a box like this (incl. wireguard!).

It might be an option worth considering if you want to go the DIY route.

So one of those Intel N100s would be sufficient to run OPNsense and hook into my NBN box?

Ahh, they state as much. “Fanless Min PC Intel N100 J1900 N2840 N5105 J4125 4x 2.5G Ethernet Support Windows Linux Pfsense OPNsense OpenWrt Virt …”

@Kangie

As I mentioned last week, if you have a “proper” firewall (e.g. opnsense, etc.) you can go one step further than blocking traffic on port 53: you can use NAT to redirect all external DNS requests to your DNS server, giving you full control over what clients in your environment can resolve (obviously your resolver needs to be allowed out from the internal DNS).

Except DNS over HTTPS/TLS, of course…

I looked at the Draytek but it does not enable the redirection of DNS queries to the pi-hole and I found blocking outgoing DNS to other sites killed my self hosted email and servarr suite. It’s possibly a docker setup issue but I have permitted outgoing for the time being as those services had to work.