I’ve been happy with racknerd. They usually run specials that are pretty reasonable: https://www.racknerd.com/NewYear/

I did have one rather long outage of about 48 hours once. The host running my VPS had a nic fail. They got it fixed and it’s been solid ever since.

I would make sure the adapter you’re using (internal or USB) supports AP mode. Most intel ones don’t: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000030429/wireless.html

I’m partial to mikrotik gear, the CRS305 has 4 sfp+ ports for around $150.

Both opnsense and pfsense allow custom DNS entries so you still have that as an option. Probably the other options do too but you’ll just have to verify.

But if you want to keep it simple I would just keep the pihole as a separate device. A lot of the built in options aernt quite as easy to setup and don’t have the best UI compared to pihole IMO.

Most of the more advanced gateways have some sort of DNS filtering built in. Opnsense has an adguard plugin, pfsense has pfblocker-ng, openwrt has a few different options, Unifi and mikrotik both have solutions too I think. Usually you can just load the same block list that pihole uses into the filtering software and you are good to go.

If you want the most flexibility and want to use the same hardware for both gateway/DNS and want to try out different DNS/router solutions a hypervisor would give you the most options. But it would also be the most complicated.

Are you sure you are typing the address in correctly on android/ios? 198.162.x.x isnt part of private IP space.

If you’re looking for a more mature networking setup, I would definitely recommend splitting up your router, switch and AP duties into separate devices. It gives you the most flexibility for when you want to tinker or change things.

For a main router setup, I would recommend OpnSense. It’s has a cloud backup feature which allows you to automatically backup the configuration to a Google Drive xml file whenever it is changed.

The XML config file stores all your leases so you don’t have to worry about reassigning DHCP reservations. If you load the config onto a new system, like for an upgrade or if the router hardware fails, usually you just have to change the interface mappings and you’re good to go.

As far as APs/switches, I would recommend Unifi or Mikrotik. Unifi has a fancy dashboard you can use to adopt new equipment and restore/change configs from, but I find Mikrotik easier and simpler to backup and I like that i dont have to host a controller to make config changes.

I do something similar with opnsense and policy based routing. opnsense is acting as both a VPN client and server. The client interface connects out to a commercial VPN, and the server interface listens for incoming connections. Based on what I I want to accomplish I setup firewall rules that use policy based routing to route incoming VPN traffic where it needs to go.

Regarding split tunnel on the client, the Android wireguard app has the option to specify what traffic uses the tunnel based on the application

Is the NIC built into the motherboard or an add on pcie card?

You could check the journal to see if the logs tell you anything.

I get quite a few reccomend actions from the sci-fi/fantasy rss feeds I’m subscribed to. I also get some from suggestions on lemmy.

If you use Firefox, the reader view works great when you want to look at just the article and nothing else.

A custom router + managed switch is a great way to learn. Studying the fundamentals is also good, but in my opinion it’s not as fun as setting up your own network and learning hands-on.

If you decide to go this route I highly reccomend taking regular backups of your config (and backup again before you change stuff). Part of learning involves breaking things - trust me you will break your network - and in networking that’s one of the best ways to learn. Backups will give you an easy way to restore to a known working configuration.

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Yes. A unifi ap connects all my wireless devices to my LAN

Yes its my main router. Everything comes into the laptop across one interface setup as a trunk that includes vlans for WAN, LAN, etc. From there proxmox has a vlan aware linux bridge setup that connects to all the VMs/containers that I run. The VM virtual interfaces get tagged with whatever network I want the host to be part of.

I have a laptop motherboard setup with proxmox running:

• plex
• radarr,sonarr,prowlarr
• opnsense
• foundry VTT
• pi-hole
• unifi controller
• qbittorrent
• kavita

This is running on an i5-1135 with 40gigs of memory. If your frugal about how you have stuff setup you can pack alot of services into old laptops.

If your VPS can connect to your home router as a client it sounds like your wireguard server on opnsense is working correctly.

Might be a problem with your phones WG config. Have you tried taking the client .conf file from your VPS and loading it onto your phone to test a working config file?