RT-AC68U - General questions about going down this AddOns path

[fredfred]

Dear folks - this is all very new to me so please be gentle : )
For years I've been using my RT-AC68U and the Merlin firmware but have never used any of these addons, I kind of knew they existed but last time I saw this was years and years back - things seem to have matured greatly!
The reason I'm hesitant about all this is I only have the one router, there are wife and kids using it and I do from time to time work from home, so screwing this up will end in tears :/
Today my router is basically just that, a router and it's been simple stable and running just fine for years.

So, what do I have today that I'd like to move to the router?
Pi-Hole (today as a container running on OMV5) - do I replace this with Diversion or AdGuardHome, what's the up or downside of each or are they the same?

WireGuard Server - I have an OMV 5 running at home, in it some docker containers, one of them is WG and I use this to connect from phone or laptop when away from home.
WireGuard client(s), I want to route almost everything out over VPN, rather different VPN(s) (more detail below).
The general question is does my router have enough juice to do this - I did use OpenVPN on the router for a while, but as soon as I started downloading large and multiple files from multiple clients the router could not take it, is Wireguard so much lighter that this will not be a problem?

About my VPN stuff..
I have two instances of pfsense running as VMs on my internal network, all they do is route traffic to two different OpenVPN connections. The way I control what client goes where is what gateway I tell the client to use.
So what I would like is to move the VPN clients on to the router and from there control what clients goes where.. is that possible - to have multiple VPN connections on the router and and make clients use one or the other or none at all?

There may be other info or issues I'm not aware of - any ideas in general?
I've been browsing the forum for a bit trying to read up, but there is lots of info and some may be out dated so it's kind of hard to get a grip on all this... any way,
all help and info is appreciated : )

 

[ColinTaylor]

AFAIK the RT-AC68U is not capable of running WireGuard, the kernel's too old.

OpenVPN client on the router - that would work but download speeds would be about 50Mbps max.

Pi-Hole - If it's working now why bother moving the burden onto the router?

 

[L&LD]

Welcome (back) to the forums @fredfred.

I would suggest you buy a new router instead (that model/design is getting close to 9 years old now).

Keep the old router as-is as you learn to install, configure and use the scripts you are interested in. You can swap it in and out of your network and get back to a working setup in the time it takes to boot it up.

Suggested models today:

Current Order of Recommended Routers Late 2021


Links that will be useful to get the new router as stable and performing as well as it can.

[Wireless] ASUS router Hard Factory Reset | Official Support | ASUS Global


And additional suggestions, best practices, and general reading to catch you up since you've been gone from the forums.

Fully Reset / Best Practice Setup / More

Almost all L&LD Links

About L&LD

About | Asuswrt-Merlin

Download | Asuswrt-Merlin


Please don't be overwhelmed by the links above. We're here to answer questions too!

 

[elorimer]

To me, the starting point is your ISP upload/download speeds. Also, it looks like you've got some heavy iron already at work for OMV5; if that is running all the time is there a need to offload any work? Maybe not. But I would think about a central logging facility and the router is a reasonable choice for that.

 

[fredfred]

First off, thank you all for info - feels good to be back
Did no realize my router is almost 9 years old! Try having kids and you loose track of lots of things

Today things around here are scattered, moving the different network/infrastructure things from docker/pfsense/pi-hole and what not to one device would greatly simplify things. It would also mean that I don't have to have the hardware running OMV not on all the time for power saving (electricity is expensive these days!)

WIFI - coverage today is great around the apt, no need for something better stronger faster.

Internet connection is 100 up/down fiber. My ISP provides IPv4 and IPv6 (I've disabled Ipv6, it's a little scary).

VPN things. I want almost all my devices to access the internet trough a VPN and I dot think I need to explain any of that to anyone here. What I also want is all devices to always be connected to home using WireGuard (phones laptop), that way they are always on the "home network" where there is always address filtering and malware protection, so I'm trying for never nothing direct access to anything. I may not click on every link to something bad, but wife and kids...

Soo.. anyway, I have a few links to read, thank you!