Heart of a Network
Having solid network infrastructure is key to running a home server environment, but is also becoming increasingly important even in the lives of less tech-savvy individuals. At the heart of most home networks is the wireless router, which directs traffic between all devices connected to the network and the broader internet. As the popularity of work-from-home, video calls, and online gaming exploded in early 2020, it became evident to many people that their cheap off-the-shelf wireless router couldn't keep up with the number of devices connecting or the sheer volume of traffic being created. Not only is this consumer-grade networking gear often unable to keep up, but it is also notoriously insecure and lacks many features that enthusiasts expect. Unpatched firmware and unsupported devices have become such an issue over the years that projects like DD-WRT, OpenWrt, and FreshTomato have sought to create open-source alternatives to pre-installed wireless router firmware. While all three of these options can provide additional security updates and features to your home router, better software can't magically improve performance of the underpowered SoCs that run in consumer-level gear.
Enterprise-grade Networking at Home
To solve this problem of underpowered home routers without breaking the bank on power-hungry and loud business-class networking gear, many in the home server community have turned to the pfSense project, which can run on practically any semi-modern x86-64 or amd64 based computer. This project aims to provide powerful router/firewall functionality built on top of FreeBSD, along with a relatively simple web interface for configuration and management. On top of being a rock-solid router and firewall with all the features you'd expect in a consumer-grade router, pfSense includes a wide variety of more advanced features that will make power-users and tinkerers grin. VPNs, traffic shaping, VLANs, Dynamic DNS, iperf, and a host of official packages give pfSense a feature set far beyond any typical off-the-shelf router. There is also a high availability feature and a straightforward backup/restore feature, which allows you to make changes to your network without the risk of too much downtime.
Below is a fantastic video from Lawrence Systems which delves into the installation and setup of pfSense. I would highly recommend installing the Status_Traffic_Totals package, which allows traffic to be monitored over time and visualized using a nice graph.
Side Note: Knowing when to Virtualize
As a final note, I would like to comment that I have been running pfSense as my main home router since sometime in late 2019. I have experimented with several different setups and have finally settled on one that I plan to stick with. At first, I ran pfSense on a dedicated server: an old Dell R710. At the time I didn't mind that it was overkill, but I soon realized that running a bunch of decommissioned Westmere based servers could really increase my power bill. Next, I tried to consolidate all of my services and VMs onto a single machine. I successfully used PCIe passthrough in Proxmox Virtual Environment to pass a network card into my pfSense VM, and I ran my network this way for a while. However, I found it annoying that every time I had to reboot my hypervisor, I also lost my internet access.
As a result, I decided to set aside a small low-power machine to act as a dedicated pfSense box: my late 2012 Mac Mini. This machine had outlived its usefulness as a desktop computer, but has provided more than enough performance to handle my fiber internet connection. It has a small footprint and has proven to be quiet, cool, and reliable. I simply ordered a thunderbolt to gigabit ethernet adapter in order to provide one LAN port and one WAN port. I would highly recommend finding a low-power machine like this for pfSense, since it is something that will be on all the time. Now I can update, reboot, and experiment with my hypervisor without internet downtime.