Selfhosted

60091 readers

1094 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:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam.
Posts here are to be centered around self-hosting. Please ensure it is clear in your post how it relates to self-hosting.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or git here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title.
No trolling.

Resources:

selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
awesome-selfhosted software
awesome-sysadmin resources
Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting

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

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

curbstickle@anarchist.nexus

curbstickle_lw@lemmy.world

Virtualizing my router - any experience to share? Pros/cons? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by GameGod@lemmy.ca to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm thinking about moving my router to be a VM on a server in my homelab. Anyone have any experience to share about this? Any downsides I haven't thought of?

Backstory: My current pfSense router box can't keep up with my new fibre speeds because PPPOE is single threaded on FreeBSD, so as a test, I installed OpenWRT in a VM on a server I have and using VLANs, got it to act as a router for my network. I was able to validate it can keep up with the fibre speeds, so all good there. While shopping for a new routerboard, I was thinking about minimizing power and heat, and it made me realize that maybe I should just keep the router virtualized permanently. The physical server is already on a big UPS, so I could keep it running in a power outage.

I only have 1 gbps fibre and a single GbE port on the server, but I could buff the LAN ports if needed.

Any downsides to keeping your router as a VM over having dedicated hardware for it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gotta disagree, for home use at least. I have found it to be the opposite of a nightmare.

Moving my home routing and firewall to a VM saved me hours, and hours, and hours of time in the long run. I have a pretty complex home network and firewall setup with multiple public IPs, multiple outbound gateways, and multiple inbound and outbound VPN setups for various purposes. I'm also one of those loons that does outbound firewall with deny by default on my network, except the isolated guest VLAN. With a complex setup like that, being in a VM means it's so easy to tweak stuff safely and roll back if you mess something up or it just doesn't work the way you expected. Turns what would be a long outage rebuilding from scratch into a 30 second outage while you roll back the VM. And being able to snapshot your setup for backup is incredibly useful when your software doesn't behave properly (looking at you, PFsense).

All that said, I run redundant, synced hypervisors which takes care of a lot of the risk. A person who is not well versed in hypervisor management might not be a good fit for this setup, but if you have any kind of experience with VM management (or want to), I think it's the way to go.

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

For sure, if your thing is leaning into network configs, nothing wrong with it, especially if you have proper failover set up.

I think virtualized routing looks fun to the learning homelabber, and it is, but it does come with some caveats.