A few years ago my prime choice as a base platform for this kind of thing would have been some PC-Engines APU board. Alas, those no longer are made.
What it comes down to is having a hardware platform – essentially a consumer grade router – with enough oomph to run the required services. It doesn't take that much, but unfortunately your average consumer router is usually under equipped on storage and RAM.
2/…
However, as of recently TP-Link – in Germany – is selling a consumer grade router device that's placed direct competition to the popular FRITZ!Box routers you can find in about 1/3rd of the households here.
Of course TP-Link doesn't specify on their product page, what and which amount of hardware this thing runs on. But… they do point you toward a source code download for GPL compliance, in other word, this thing definitely does run Linux.
My OS of choice would be NetBSD though…
So here's the question: For the upcoming gloom-season shall I buy one of those TP-Link-Boxes and see if I can make NetBSD run on them?
4/4 poll
@datenwolf go for it, if you're having fun doing it or enjoy the learning experience.
On a different note: https://www.ipu-system.de/
bit more expensive than a consumer router bit you can install any normal OS on it and run whatever you want, i.e. Opnsense/Proxmox etc.
Doesn't have an built-in DSL modem, though, which is part of the appeal. A router offering that gives you a well designed and configured self-hosted environment out of the box would enormously lower the bar of entry.