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Using a dedicated firewall appliance like OpnSense 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. Don't worry, it will not be any easier, in fact it will be much more complex to manage! But, at the same time, much more powerful and effective.
Networking
The second issue with using a laptop is that you will need at least two, better three, wired Ethernet connections to use your server:
- 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)
I suggest to avoid using WiFi because or reliability and bandwidth, so you need three Ethernet NICs. If you are lucky, your laptop should have one, the others needs to be added via USB network cards. This is where things get a bit complex because USB network cards are quite unreliable. Luckily Linux nowadays support most of existent USB network cards, but in my experience they tend to fail quite easily. Some suggestions:
- Buy a known brand, stick to 1Gbps cards
- Prefer USB-3 ro USB-C (seems more solid kernel drivers?)
- Avoid “multi-hubs-with-also-ethernet” and buy devices that does only one thing: networking
- Keep them cooled: heat will make them fail more than often
If you experience links going down, buy a different brand / model and hope for the best.
Routing
Your laptop will be your server and your router. Which means that all your services will run on it as well as all your routing tables, fail-over between ISPs and such.
This means that if you mess up or need to reboot the laptop, your home will lose internet connection for a while. Also, if your laptop dies for any reason you will not only lose all your self-hosted services (until you restore a backup/replace hardware) but also everybody at home will be cut from internet.
Setting up routing with multi-ISPs (fail-over, or load sharing…) will be done manually with a few routing rules and settings (see Routing on the Home Server, Network Configuration for the Home Router and such pages).
While less glamour than using a fancy web GUI, it fits the same purpose and maybe it's also interesting to learn. This approach doesn't limit you to anything, actually might even be more fun than the advanced approach, but more error-prone e less resilient.
Networking
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)
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.
Routing
The routing for the home network will be managed by your firewall appliance and OpnSense. OF critical importance is to properly define how you want to organize your network, and understand how a firewall applicance works to be able to leverage it's power properly.
More details will be provided later on.