I stumbled onto NextDNS recently — it’s like a cloud hosted Pi-hole. I tried it for a few days, but this post isn’t about that.

Reading about the different block lists in NextDNS, and digging deeper into DNS ad blocking gave me motivation to change my current setup — and that is what this post is about 🙂

I’ve had many routers over the years — Linksys WRT54GL, Linux and iptables, ASUS RT-N66U, Ubiquiti USG, OPNsense, Ubiquiti EdgeRouter, and MikroTik CCR1009. At least those are the ones I can remember.

But I’ve been fascinated by VyOS ever since I first heard about it, even more so after using the EdgeRouter CLI. As both VyOS and EdgeOS are forks of Vyatta.

Fascinated and intimidated is probably more accurate — the lack of a GUI doesn’t give you a lot of help… But at the same time, it’s a great learning experience — you have to know and understand what you are doing 🙂

So I set out to replace my internet facing router — with a virtualized VyOS instance 🙂