I’m curious about firewalls. I have a Protectli FW4B along with a backup edge router ER-X and decided to do some testing. There are a handful of different ideas I wanted to explore.

The first had to do with the value of the next-generation firewall capabilities like threat protection. Practically, it doesn’t matter that much for me, it’s just my wife and I, but I was curious if it would be a valuable thing to deploy for my mom and how difficult they would be to be useful.

I recently switched from pfSense to https://www.ipfire.org and got to learn the hoops needed for PPPoE over a vlan like Centurylink needs.

In IPFire this is considered a VDSL connection and isn’t available during the guided setup. But overall it’s a pretty easy process. You’ll need your PPPoE username and password from centurylink to get started.

During initial setup select the Dialup option (even though you are on Fiber :) ).

I’ve been using Pi-Hole for a while and it just caused too many problems. Many shopping carts across the web would just fail. I need to run google ad campaigns and you can’t get to the admin UI. Therefore I decided to move dns resolving back to my ER-X and instead use cloudflared to resolve DNS queries so CenturyLink has a harder time selling my browsing history.

I found a great post on how to do this at: https://reichley.tech/dns-over-https-edgerouter-x/ but it doesn’t cover the v2 series of EdgeOS based on Debian 9. These are my quick notes on changes to their directions.