I’m curious, you got anything light reading you can recommend to ease into the topic, please pm me. I’d appreciate, if it wasn’t another post which basically recites the content of another post, and so on - far too much out there these days)

I cannot recommend any consumer router brand, at least not with stock firmware, because any of them don’t have guaranteed update policy. Further, some of the stock firmware contains insecure protocols, like telnet (yes, still), outdated ciphers (SSL, TLS 1.0), and some feature you want is always missing. Further they often lack innovative features like WireGuard in updates, mostly bug fixes and security patches.

That’s why I would urge you to consider using one of the router/ gateway distributions listed below.

Depending on your requirements, I can recommend the following router OS:

• OpenSense (router without WiFi)
• OpenWRT (router with WiFi)

If you have an old laptop or pc to spare, you could at least give those two a try.

Someone already mentioned it, OpenSense runs only on x86 / PC Hardware (and MiPS). OpenWRT can be flashed onto a lot of consumer routers as well as be installed on traditional x86 / PC hardware.

OpenWRT has a hardware table on their website for supported models. Some of them come cheap if you buy them used and are pretty decent.

If you like more flexibility, I can recommend building your own router. Used thin clients, Iike for example Fujitsu Futro S920. Thin clients are basically low-powered PCs, which are often cheap on the used market and provide a variety of hardware interfaces. Most use Intel NICs, some have secondary NIC, can hold SATA disks, provide interfaces for WiFi (pice, miniPCIe, m.2) or extension cards, have high efficient power supplies and are in majority are passive cooled. Or get some SBC/ Low-Powered board with the interfaces you need. It doesn’t need to be new hardware.

Please don’t host a router on a Hypervisor VM. That does not benefit security. First of all a router is an integral part of the (home) network, therefore it should not be dependent on anything, like a hypervisor. You want to be able to replace or update your server/ hypervisor independently from each other, for example in 5 hrs your router might be still rocking all data, but you would want to upgrade your home server / hypervisor. Furthermore all those OpenWRT, PFsense, OpenSense kernel/ OS hardening is more effective on the hardware itself, especially all RAM/ Memory based security measures. Also if you truly want to be more secure, you use dedicated hardware for multiple reasons, performance is dedicated to only routing/ firewall processing (no other service/ VM can block or slow down packet processing), reducing the attack surface (less software, less attack surface), easier to update.

Many given good advice on hardware, and there are plenty other threads with a lot of good recommendations.

Regarding OS, I would recommend to ease into it, and try some before committing. Just try a few services, how stable it is and if the configuration complexity meets your personal learning expectations. (Self hosting is only fun, as long as you can get everything up and running. If you need 36hrs of troubleshooting for every 2nd problem, that awe for elf hosting melts pretty fast.)

• OpenMediaVault
• Unraid
• TrueNAS
• CasaOS.io

I started myself with OMV 0.x, and since then it’s gotten pretty decent. But I switched to plain Debian and CLI tool. After learning enough using OMV as my starting point. I also tried FreeNAS in the beginning, but that wasn’t for me.

And I recently discovered CasaOS, wich is pretty neat and has a lot of benefits, but I haven’t tested it yet.

True, but for playing around with lemmy and doing some test's it's ideal - and it's free! In case you are serious about hosting a lemmy instance, there should be at least some sort of backup/ disaster recovery strategy in place.

I’m not sure if it’s still valid, but Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) had a 4 vCPU, 24 GB RAM, 200 GB HDD free tier. No costs, ever! You could sign up there and setup an even bigger instance.

I know it’s been mentioned before - but plain Wireguard is my way to go. KISS - keep it simple, stupid! setup might be a little bit of a learning curve, but once you got it for one device, others aren’t a big issue.

I had a CA, with OpenVPN, but that’s to much for a small setup like remote access to your home network.

Use it on iOS, Ubuntu and Windows to access my home services and DNS (Split-Tunnel).

It’s a pretty easy setup on OpenWrt. A quick look into the fresh tomato wiki tells me, that it shouldn’t be to complicated to achieve on your router (firmware). If you need help with setting Wireguard up, let me know, I’m happy to help out.

Codeberg is using Forgejo, basically Gitea. You can change the editor, if you like with other editors if you host Forgejo or Gitea yourself. Features like CI/CD can be deactivated.

Thanks for letting me know.

Damn shame - why do humans have to ruin places, like a plague of locusts

Yes, you can. See my post I made on lemmy.world - showing up in the feed of @fediverse@lemmy.world using my mastodon.social account (in the mastodon app). For that to work you have to have the community address and look for it via the search on the mastodon instance.

Screenshot is made in the mastodon instance.

Totally agree! I just have been a registered reader on Reddit. Now, it’s the first time I’m participating - might be considerably because lemmy is trending. Nevertheless, I found communities and post I’m interested in within minutes - 👌🏼 whereas Reddit was mostly clutter.

I had only logitech for years, using Windows, Linux, BSD, Dos… without any issues. The older model (probably 15years+) is still working perfectly, mechanical & PS/2. And that has been drowned in Coffee, water, whiskey and what else. Put it in the washing machine (with some clothes to bolster), let it dry and use it like the first day! 👌🏼 Even my current one, for about 10 years in service works like a charm. I admit both are #lowtech devices