Management of your home network is educational and allows you to control a small data center. When it comes to WiFi, vendor management consoles are consumer oriented, have limited functionality, and lose support. The OpenWrt project can update the firmware on many vendor devices to an open-source, embedded Linux system focused on network management. I tried it out in 2015, upgraded it a few times, but have been unsuccessful trying to upgrade it to latest release for years now. I will chronicle the successive automation steps and a framework leading to benchmarking OpenWrt!

For my 2020-1 holiday break, I decided my next personal project would be to rebuild my home infrastructure on containers. I’d been inspired by a recent discovery of LinuxServer.io, where open source projects are built and run as containers. While I have a burning desire to better my Kubernetes practice, not enough of the world delivers software as a Helm chart, so merely running everything as containers would be a good intermediate step. Let me share my first six steps with examples…