I’m definitely new to networking, but I’ve already done some research and I guess I thought I understood it but now I’m not so sure. That’s all interesting information though, thanks. I’ll be sure to read more about it.

By NGFW I was referring to things like Endian, OPNSense, pfSense, Sophos, and Untangle. Are they really not worth it for hobbyist use? Right now all I have is ufw (and some scanners like clamav, maldet, aide, and rkhunter), but all that seems to do is block and/or whitelist IPs and ports. I would have thought a NGFW would be worth it, at least for anything that’s going to be public-facing.

Is OpenWRT even a good idea for a network switch? The router I’m looking at comes with it by default, so chances are I won’t have to configure it much myself. But for the network switch my main concern is that I don’t want to use some proprietary firmware that’s just gonna phone home to the company’s servers and basically render any privacy/security measures I take useless.

I know to avoid netgear, but is there a particular brand of network switch that FOSS/homelab people prefer and trust? If so I’ll just use the default firmware…

Why would I not know what they mean?

A Virtual LAN lets you group different ports by priority and security level. Trusted devices behind the most security, quarantined from public-facing devices with different security features, quarantined from a guest network that you can let people connect to without exposing your whole system.

QoS prioritizes some tasks over others. If you have a matrix server on one port and you’re playing a game on another, it can prioritize traffic for the port that the game is on.

A Network Gate Firewall has additional security features that ufw doesn’t have, including active sniffing and packet filtering.

A managed switch is a network switch that has a CPU to enable these kinds of features. Unlike an unmanaged switch, which only does packet switching, but is still better than a plain ethernet hub.

Not sure why you felt the need to be condescending. You could have just said that the OpenWRT kernel doesn’t support every feature that the hardware does and maybe list some of the ones that it doesn’t. It wouldn’t have been that hard.

I don’t think I need that, but it sounds interesting and I’ll keep that in mind if I run into any problems that it might fix.

My main intent is just to run a router to the switch, and then connect a few different devices, like a raspberry pi and a couple old laptops, set up VLANs, and basically just use it to learn computer networking. I don’t have much use for a homelab at this time, but it sounds cool and I want to learn how to do it

What do you mean? It’s a network switch, that’s all it’s supposed to do.

Unless you mean it can’t do VLAN, QOS, and NGFW like a managed network switch should. Is that the case?

The Table of Hardware reveals that the GS1900 does work with OpenWRT, so that answers my question perfectly! Thanks!

I’m pretty sure I’ll get a router from GL-iNet, but I haven’t seen them offer any network switches.

And I was thinking about getting a Protectli Vault just to put Sentry Firewall on it between the router and the switch, but that seems like way overkill, and for the price it just doesn’t seem worth it. I’ll just put a NGFW on the switch or the router.

Aha! That’s perfect, thanks. It turns out the GS1900 is compatible with OpenWRT. Good to know!

OpenWisp sounds interesting. Is that similar to Prometheus or Grafana, or does it do more? And should I put that on my router or network switch?

Isn’t that just the firmware? I’m looking for hardware that’s compatible with it

Sounds alright, but it appears to be unmanaged, so it doesn’t meet my needs