core VS openNDS

BSDs may not have a significant presence on desktops, but they're well known in the networking world for their reliability. They also were the foundation used to build OSes for specific applications. OpnSense and XigmaNAS, for example, are two excellent FreeBSD based applications aimed at firewalling/security and NAS/services.

https://opnsense.org/

https://xigmanas.com/xnaswp/

For switches? OpenWrt supports a few models toward the lower end, and SONiC support a bunch at the higher-end datacenter ToR market, but none of these options are SME production-ready like Linux servers or OPNsense firewalls.

One option is Firewalla Gold Plus, or you could buy a mini PC like it and run pfSense/OPNsense yourself.

Another option is Firewalla, or buy a mini PC like it and run pfSense/OPNsense yourself. Two similar concepts, with the cost being either money or your DIY time. A lot of Firewalla users say that it's much easier for home use than pfSense/OPNsense, so you might find it worthwhile to spend a little more on it upfront and have to tinker less.

If you want firewall, I think you can use https://www.pfsense.org/ or https://opnsense.org/ , maybe running on an old PC or a Raspberry Pi. Not sure.

I've recently started using OPNsense. It's similar to pfSense, but seems to be considered a little more user-friendly.

For most router issues, I recommend people always put them in to dumb bridge mode and put a proper firewall like pfsense or opnsense as your gateway.

First of all; understand what it is the software you want to use actually does. I know that Proxmox is a Hypervisor and can run multiple VMs (Virtual Machines) and LXCs (Linux Containers) which is great, but there are a lot of options for setting up these things. For example, I really liked the idea of having my router be a VM that ran OpnSense so that I can run multiple router-specific things on the same machine like PiHole and Wireguard. This means I can get away with using fewer individual boxes (physical computers or servers), I have flexibility if I want to run *other* types of VMs that act as services for my router and I can very easily allocate expand, reallocate and change the underlying hardware for each machine. Lots of tweaking.

OPNsense

I am currently creating a captive portal site with opennds. For this i use FAS (Forward Authentication Service) with this php script on a seperate server. In it you can see that it serves html with echo command.