In addition to ham radio, I am also a bit of an experimenter with computers and networks. Quite a few years ago, I started playing around with DD-WRT for consumer equipment, and happily ran different iterations of that over the years. As a fan of gaming and video streaming, I have always looked for ways to improve my network speeds and, with how easy it is to crack wifi anymore, my security as well. I also have three kids, so I am not only worried about how secure things are, but online safety is a concern that has grown with my children. The older and more connected they become, the more advanced my filters and firewalls have to be.
I addressed the firewall issue in my project article about Sophos XG. There are several pieces of equipment that run my home network and I will cover them here. The first piece is the aforementioned Sophos XG firewall. It is contained in a Rosewill brand 2U case, and does a great job! Read the linked article above for detail on it.
The next item is my RADIUS server. I have it running on an old Google Mini Search Appliance. This is a cool little box that I picked up pretty cheap. The OS is Ubuntu and is running FreeRADIUS. It handles this task well and I am probably going to move my TFTP server
(more on that below) over to it before too long.
