How I re–over-engineered my home network for privacy and security
I&#x27;ve gotten into networking and very much enjoy seeing how others approach the problem space at the scale level! It&#x27;s gotten more important with not just the explosion of online threats, smart home devices etc., but also just because there is more and more value to be extracted from a high bandwidth WAN link via your own private services. That said I definitely strongly recommend <i>against</i> using anything UniFi based for routing&#x2F;gateway tasks at this point (author mentions their AIO custom hardware UDM thing). They have significant issues now in WiFi and even switching, but at least remain kind of workable there. But the company has been an absolutely depressing development dumpster fire for years now and the trajectory still appears aimed straight down. And for whatever reason routing&#x2F;gateway in particular is an area that only ever briefly got much oxygen there. So for a greenfield situation I&#x27;d be wary.<p>There are lots of enormously better solutions for that. Personally I&#x27;ve dumped all my UniFi gateways (including some of the &quot;next generation&quot; ones I had for testing) and moved to OPNsense running on decent SuperMicro 1U edge systems (excellent value, quiet, regularly available dirt cheap on ebay and the like). But there are many great options there including VyOS, OpenWRT, or even just running straight OpenBSD if that&#x27;s what you like. Router&#x2F;gateway is one area where I thinking devoting real metal, preferably with higher reliability hardware and extra remote management options (like IPMI), is worth it. It&#x27;s an important linchpin for a typical network, and while virtualizing it is possible and definitely desirable at large scale it&#x27;s not where I want to add more moving parts without a team behind it. Everything else can go tits up while I mess with it or there are odd interactions and as long as the gateway&#x2F;routing is still solid odds are I can recover without much disruption or having to physically be there.