Pretty much what the title says. I added an OPNSense router to my homelab about a month or two ago, along with a Ubiquiti Managed Layer-2 Switch and a Linksys AP with Openwrt flashed onto it so I could get the full modem --> router --> switch --> AP combo and freedom to do what I want (VLANs, real firewall rules, eventual IDS/IPS and QoS planned).

But for the last two/three weeks or so, every week at least once a day will the Internet go down for some reason, leaving my family without internet for an hour or more. The catch is, this is happening even when my family is connected to the Wi-Fi provided by the original ISP modem-router and not my new network running on OPNsense. A few weeks ago, we had an outage, but my mom thought it was my fault at the time, so I took the modem out of bridge mode so that they would switch to that Wifi if one of my devices had an issue for some reason.

I know it’s not overlapping networks, OPNSense’s WAN uplink is set to dhcp, and the LAN is 192.168.1.0/24 while the original Cox WiFi LAN is 192.168.0.0/24. The Wi-Fi frequencies aren’t overlapping either (although 2.4 GHz is the only one that problem anyway right? My 5GHz freqs are different anyway), but once again, it seems like the Cox modem literally shits itself and that it’s not just a network issue. The same amount of devices are connecting, I haven’t added 100+ devices to the OPNsense network that would cause the modem to overload.

We have a Cox Technicolor CGM4331. When operating normally, the router’s color is solid white, but when it’s having these issues, I’m pretty sure it turns solid orange/amber, which apparently means it’s powering up. I’ll verify if it’s solid orange or blinking though, as blinking amber means downstream is being registered (flashing green is upstream). Sometimes rebooting/unplugging it works, but today my mom said it didn’t.

We’ve had some confirmed ISP outages within the month, even on days without bad weather, and Cox got bought by Spectrum, so I wonder if there’s something there. But it’s reaching a point where I’m about to just turn off my networking stuff to see if it’s still shitting itself, but I don’t want to have to do that since I’d have to fix my homelab service IPs again…

I just don’t want my parents to get sick of my shit man 😭

EDIT

I’m a dumbass and forgot that I plugged it into this new UPS that I got, but it also has my Proxmox Dell and OPNsense HP plugged into it, which draw more power. So if any sort of power blip happened, it probably affected the modem and made it get stuck during bootup (hence the orange color). I’ve plugged it back into a regular power socket and will see if the issues stop! Thanks everyone :)

Heya, I just wanted to post here before doing something that puts my stuff out on the internet for anyone to see 😅

So I have a basic, still in-configuration homelab network going on. It’s Modem --> OPNsense router --> Ubiquiti switch --> Openwrt AP. DNS and DHCP (via Dnsmasq) are working right now, each VLAN (Home Devices, IoT, and Guest) can access the internet. But I’m still tinkering and doing firewall stuff, so sometimes I reactivate the ISP router and switch back to that until I have everything perfect enough to not bother my family

I have a Proxmox homelab that I’ve been running services like Jellyfin and Immich in a Docker Debian VM for a few months now, but I was getting tired of typing out IPs and remembering port nums, especially after bouncing between my router and the original ISP router whenever I’m having network issues. So I wanted to finally map those IPs to human-friendly domains. So like, 192.168.10.247:8096 --> jellyfin.example.com, 192.168.10.247:2283 --> immich.example.com, etc.

I quickly learned that DNS services like Unbound and Dnsmasq do what they say on the tin, DNS only, so I can’t do a override to map ports to a domain, as they can only do IPs. My research led me to reverse proxies, and people said Caddy was simple on OPNsense, so I installed that and followed the official guide/documentation. But then I ran into the issue of needing the domain to be externally resolveable. Which then led me to realizing I need to use some sort of CA.

I know Let’s Encrypt does it for free, plus the guide mentions them as a default so why not? Except I still need an actual external domain so… Cloudflare? DuckDNS? Someone else? I’m so lost…

The biggest concern of mine right now is, if I set up a reverse proxy, does that mean my services are externally accessible? I was using Tailscale so I could avoid that, especially since I know services like Jellyfin have had serious vulnerabilities, and everyone says it’s a good rule of thumb to just not expose services. But how do I map ip + port #s to a domain on OPNsense?

Edit:

Thanks for the help and guidance guys! I ended up going to the OPNSense forums to ask for more help, and I kinda fixed my problem. Here’s the solution:

I was making domain overrides to the wrong IP. DON’T put the IP of the docker VM as the override because it will bypass your Firewall/Caddy service. Make a DNS override mapping your_site.name.internal to your router IP (192.168.1.1, etc.)

Note: I’m using .internal TLDs (top-level domains) for my services because I don’t plan to put them on the internet anytime soon. So I don’t need to worry about Cloudflare, buying a domain, or Certificate Authorities (CAs) and stuff. It’d be nice to do local https, but I’m lazy rn.

After that, make sure your browser doesn’t have DNS over HTTPS on, or else it won’t be able to resolve local domains

If you’re still having issues try doing curl -vk http://your.site.name.internal or curl -vk http://your.site.name.internal:port# to see what’s going wrong.

Meant to edit this a while ago but I eventually did it!

Just wanted to share this Youtube video (Invidious link here) that explains how to configure Openwrt VLANs for your Wifi network! I was struggling for hours today trying to configure VLANs on my Openwrt AP when I found an old Reddit thread linking to this guy’s channel!

He seems to have a whole series on Openwrt, so if you need a complete beginner guide he sounds great!