Hello selfhosted.
My router just burnt up and instead of buying a new one, I’m thinking of turning my own built NAS/home server into a router. Is this possible?
The server in question is a normal computer running debian, where I have a few disks in RAID and host some web services. The motherboard only has one RJ45 port, so my guess is that I have to at least get a network card that supports 2 ports. I’m no stranger to linux but physical networking is not my home field, though I’m very interested.
If someone could point me in the right direction, I would be more than happy.
Short answer: yes
Though anything else I could not say better than this guide: https://opnsense.org/get-started/
Sorry I was probably not very clear on one part, I’m looking to run a router additionally to my already existing debian installation. OPNsense seems very nice, but that would require me switching to FreeBSD, which I’m not very keen on right now.
Well all Linux systems can easily be turned into routers if they have 2 or more networking ports.
All you have to do is enable routing, the firewall rules for routing internal traffic and restrictions on external traffic, and dhcp services to the internal network (assuming that you don’t have a dedicated dhcp server)
Here is an example: https://github.com/dhenkes/router
Basically any Linux router guide (for any Linux distribution) can be used with minimal translation as they are all going to be using the exact same software with virtually identical configurations.
