Having recently received a couple of hand-me-down mini-ITX firewall-type systems, I figured I'd challenge myself to replace my commercial home router and access point with one of the systems.

I initially embarked on this journey using NetworkManager. To do so, I configured a Fedora system with dhcpd, nftables, and NetworkManager, jotting down the configuration in step-by-step configuration notes. This setup has performed great for the past several months doing simple Ethernet-only routing, but it felt cumbersome and error-prone (plus I wanted to integrate WiFi).

Since then, I evolved this project to make it more easily-reproducible and flexible to different configurations. The project continues to use dhcpd and nftables but also leverages new tools as well. An Ansible playbook replaces configuration notes, and systemd-networkd takes the place of NetworkManager. I also introduced hostapd to optionally configure WiFi access points and Vagrant to streamline testing the Ansible playbook.

This project is available here on my GitHub and includes setup instructions in the README. It currently supports Fedora and Ubuntu, but that may change in the future as I explore new tools to accomplish this.

To set this up on your own system, I recommend at least being familiar with these commands, in addition to Linux generally. Please reach out if you have any questions!