Network Gateway

Your home has it's internal network (more details about it here) and at least one external connection, your ISP.

The interface between your internal network and the internet is also called your gateway and it's a critical piece of infrastructure. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) will indeed provide you with one device that acts as a gateway, but you should think of this device as dangerous and not good to be your internet gateway because this device is actually in the hands of your ISP. In my experience, changing ISP will give you a different ISP gateway which will be incompatible with the older one and force you to change your internal network. Moreover, who knows if your ISP gateway has backdoors or other security issues?

In other words: you need to purchase and setup a dedicated gateway for your home network.

From the network hardware point of view, you want to purchase a so called firewall appliance with at least four Ethernet NICs. The CPU is not very important, the cheapest you find should be already more than enough. RAM and storage requirements might vary, depending if you want to do web caching or not.

Your firewall appliance will need at least two, better three, wired Ethernet connections:

• One LAN interface, to talk to all your home devices
• One, or better two, WAN interfaces, to talk to your one, or better two, ISPs (Internet Service Providers)
• One DMZ for services on the home server

I suggest to avoid using WiFi because or reliability and bandwidth, so you need three Ethernet NICs. If you don't want to buy a dedicated firewall appliance hardware, you can always emulate one with a normal PC, plugging in as many PCI-Express NICs as needed. The overall power consumption will be higher tough, so i recommend to go for a low-power firewall appliance. In both cases, you will be installing OpnSense on it, so the hardware doesn't matter much.

My choice is the amazing OpnSense which is the best approach to unleash the full potential of your network, it let's you manage ISP failover, VLAN, DNS filtering and resolving, and much more using a nice web GUI interface on well-proven, state of the art, firewall dedicated software.

OpnSenses is based on BSD, so it's hardware compatibility list is quite limited, specially on the WiFi side of things…