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Comment by yabones | Hacker News Reader

Even easier, just throw together some iptables rules & install dnsmasq. Obviously out of reach of most non-techy people but it's not much worse than most self-hosted things people build. I've even done it with USB-Ethernet dongles.

Maybe "whitebox" stuff will have a moment here. Buy a ARM based "computer" that just happens to have a built in switch and 802.11 radio, and separately purchase an SD card with the OS on it.

Or, perhaps this will be VyOS's time to shine... https://vyos.io/

Can't really see anything really happening in the consumer space, but maybe business/enterprise will move in one direction or another.

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The easiest one I've set up was ClearOS. I was happy enough with OpnSense but when I upgraded a network card I had issues with driver compatibility because of the FreeBSD core. ClearOS being Linux it worked out of the box, and getting ClearOS set up seriously only took me like fifteen minutes. I was shocked.

I love my NixOS thing, because I am part of the cult of NixOS, but it's probably something I wouldn't recommend for most people because it was kind of a pain in the ass to get working. The reason I do it now is because it lives on the same box that is my server.

I've looked into Vyos, it sort of reminds me of the Cisco stuff and it looks interesting, but it never seemed sufficiently better than my NixOS thing.

Having to debug NixOS offline (that is - without the aid of Gemini CLI) sounds like a special kind of pain.

You get used to it, honestly.

I really don't think that the Nix language is nearly as bad as people say it is once you get used to it, and I've been using NixOS since before ChatGPT was released so I've gotten pretty ok with it. Plus, there are niceties like being able to use variables for things like interface names which makes it pretty nice.

Also, something kind of nice about NixOS is that once you get it working, it kind of stays working. I have my config file backed up to Sourcehut, and I'm relatively confident that the configuration file is an accurate representation of reality.

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