Introduction

So I want to run a router at home.

My topology is the following: I have a glasfiber modem/router at home (Freebox) with nat. There are PCs connected to its LAN and also iPads et cetera to its wifi.

I want to stick a little PC in between that would be the only connected device to the Freebox.

All other devices shall be connected to the new little PC.

Hardware

For the hardware I want to use a Protectli VP2420. The Protectli would be awesome. I know that this is rather costly. Maybe I will decide for an old PC with an extra LAN card and see how far I will come with that.

Generic Intel nics will be fine with OpenBSD.

For the wifi I need an adapter that works with OpenBSD and can open an own wifi network. I think I will use a device supported by the athn(4) driver. One possible such unit would be the

Toshiba WLM-20u2 USB dongle with ar9280 chipset.

Planning the architecture

There are two exhaustive guides for building a router with firewall, dhcp and dns in the interwebs, but the guides I will follow along, are the following:

First and foremost the guide from the OpenBSD FAQ

Last but not least I will consult heavily the OpenBSDRouterGuide

I wanto to follow mostly the guide from the OpenBSD FAQ with some salt and pepper from the other one.

In part 2 of this series I will show how my setup has worked out or not. I will also talk about shortcomings and tweaks.

Conclusion

I’m looking forward to setting up my home router and firewall. OpenBSD surely is the right system to use.