David's Space

Secure Home network with OpenBSD and an EdgeRouter Lite.

I decided to finally take the steps to seperate my home network into multiple segments for security reasons. The goal is to create a secure wired and wireless lan while also having a less secure wireless network. Smartphones and guest devices use the less secure network and the wired network and wireless clients that need access to my home server and network printer use the secure network. My current ISP allows multiple public DHCP addresses to be assiged thru a single cable connection. I have an 8 port gigabit switch attached to my cable modem. Connected to that is a standard Cisco EA6300 and a Ubiquity Edge Router Lite. The EA6300 is used for the less secure wireless network and the Ubiquity router is the gateway for the secure network.

I bought the EdgeRouter Lite a few years ago and used it for a while. I was never really happy with the EdgeOS that comes on the router. After some googling I decided to try OpenBSD on it. When I tried it originally there was no SMP kernel for the EdgeRouter so the preformance of the router was decent but not what I was looking for. This time I installed OpenBSD 6.2 using the instructions here. I also was able to find this article that showed how to install the SMP kernel so that both the processor cores of the EdgeRouter are useable.

Thanks to Calomel.org for all their good bsd tutorials. So far the EdgeRouter is preforming very well with OpenBSD 6.2. My next step is to try configuration with Ansible using this Github example.