this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
85 points (96.7% liked)

Selfhosted

40133 readers
1006 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hiya, just getting into networking and recently completed my Tp-link Omada stack, which I'm very pleased with. Have heard great thing about all three mentioned services above, but struggle to understand which to go for. Do they have different use cases? Is one easier than the other? Which one is recommended to begin with?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

They all offer more or less the same network services with different UIs.

OpenWRT is specifically designed to work as a lightweight system running on consumer-grade routers. If you want this, you'll have to check the website's Table Of Hardware to determine if your hardware is compatible.

OPNsense and pfSense are general-purpose FreeBSD-based operating systems that you can run on discrete computers or in VMs that act as network gateways. All three are free/gratis, but you have to make an account and go through the store page to download pfSense.

I personally use OPNsense in a VM.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

OpenWRT is a iot operating system. It can run anywhere and everywhere. You can totally run it on enterprise gear and x86 machines. It can work as a firewall or a operating system for a light bulb. It also has the advantage of being very extensible and you can build custom images that have only the stuff you need.

The downside is that even though the wiki is fairly good it still requires a good amount of networking knowledge to use. It isn't bad and it ships with sain defaults but if you want to get advanced you need to know what you are doing.

It also lacks a mechanism for automatic security patching. You need to manually update it which is easier with attended upgrades but it still requires button pushing and downtime.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Thanks for the info :)