| You know, I used to do this and give the same advice as well but after a lot of time spent on it, I am not anymore. The way OpenWRT handles routing and firewall rules is particular and they apply their own terminology for some things. They have their own distro-specific packages for things like DHCP (odhcp(c)d) and firewall (fw3). For very simple networks, it's very smooth to get to where you want. Add on dual-stack v4/v6, vlans, multiple firewall zones, routing policies etc and things start becoming very unpredictable. Oh, and that adblock package? Turns out a single invalid line in a blocklist will completely break DNS (at least on the version I was running from last year). Not to mention that (AFAIK) there's no good way to keep up to date with security patches and bugfixes while keeping the system stable. After all the countless hours I poured into OpenWRT configuration, I finally realized that it's so much less pain and confusion with vanilla Debian with systemd-networkd (which BTW natively supports setting up Wireguard interfaces now) and firewalld+nftables, everything configured via ansible playbooks. For someone diving into this today, it's a lot easier and more future-proof with nftables than iptables - and OpenWRT will be married to iptables for the foreseeable future. It's great that it works for you, but if you like I did have some imposter syndrome over not perfectly understanding Linux networking and are happy that OpenWRT takes care of those confusing iptables rules and routing policies and what-not - you may just discover that learning how it actually works will take less work than abusing OpenWRT into doing what you want. Sure, you have to give up the WebUI and some of the custom add-ons. I am sure BSD or Rocky Linux are fine choices as well; Debian just happens to be what I mostly use for servers otherwise. I don't want to hate too much on OpenWRT as it's great for novices with trivial needs and there are many devices where it or dd-wrt are the only readily available options. But if you run Linux anyway and have an x86/amd64/arm device you're going to use as a main router, I'd recommend choosing a "normal" distro and setting things up from scratch. |