I’ve been happy with racknerd. They usually run specials that are pretty reasonable: www.racknerd.com/NewYear/

I did have one rather long outage of about 48 hours once. The host running my VPS had a nic fail. They got it fixed and it’s been solid ever since.

I would make sure the adapter you’re using (internal or USB) supports AP mode. Most intel ones don’t: www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/…/wireless.html

Secret Hitler is CC 4.0. They have a print and play version you can download on the website for free.

If you set a static ip can you get connectivity? Have you confirmed that your interface is still up via Ifconfig or ip link?

I’m partial to mikrotik gear, the CRS305 has 4 sfp+ ports for around $150.

There came an echo by giant big circles.

Wow that sounds terrible… Especially with encouraging employers to increase birth rates, a lot of sexual harassment is going to be swept under the rug.

Both opnsense and pfsense allow custom DNS entries so you still have that as an option. Probably the other options do too but you’ll just have to verify.

But if you want to keep it simple I would just keep the pihole as a separate device. A lot of the built in options aernt quite as easy to setup and don’t have the best interface compared to pihole IMO.

Most of the more advanced gateways have some sort of DNS filtering built in. Opnsense has an adguard plugin, pfsense has pfblocker-ng, openwrt has a few different options, Unifi has a solution too I think. Usually you can just load the same block list that pihole uses into the filtering software and you are good to go.

If you want the most flexibility and want to use the same hardware for both gateway/DNS and want to try out different DNS/router solutions a hypervisor would give you the most options. But it would also be the most complicated.