homelab
Homelab I-Should-Travel 10 months ago 100%
pf/opnsense question

I'm gonna virtualize one of these sooner or later to get some networking hands-on experience for myself. While I don't plan to throw my current router in the trash day 1, how (not?) safe is it to switch over to using it as your router in the sense of making sure things like basic firewall protections and whatnot are up? Is it set and forget and you'd have to turn things off/create exceptions to create huge vulnerabilities, like anything else? Or do you have to build it all from the ground up and know what you're doing entirely? Also, If down the line I wanted to ditch a router entirely, I'd still want wifi. Is that something where I just buy the cheapest router from amazon and have it only serve wifi, or is there some kind of way I can slap a wifi dongle into a usb port somewhere and have it transmit instead of receive? Also feel free to have an argument about if I should start with pfsense or opnsense. Leaning toward opnsense since things I've read have implied it's a little easier to set up and start with, and they're similar enough I can always hop to the other.

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homelab
Homelab I-Should-Travel 10 months ago 100%
EliteDesk 800 G2 v G3 v OptiPlex 5050 SFF

>800 G2 - **$130** - i7 6700 - 32GB DDR4 - 256gb SSD - no M.2 slot >800 G3 - **$130** - i7 7700 - 16GB DDR4 - 256GB SSD - GT 730 2GB (who cares, though) > OptiPlex 5050 - **$109** - i5 7500 - 16GB DDR4 - 256GB M.2 Which one for a beginner homelab? Yes, a previous thread suggested something full size, but going to start with this. I figure I can probably still stuff those PCI SATA cards in here. Feels hard to decide. They all have their ups and downs based on things I could upgrade.

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homelab
Homelab I-Should-Travel 10 months ago 100%
Home server - old laptop/dell optiplex?

For a basic *removed* beginner home lab, finding something like an i5-i7 laptop/optiplex on craigslist/fb market is more than good enough, right? My initial uses are basically thinking to be a plex server, NAS, and maybe a VM to run a pihole or something.

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