Setting up a very simple (but IPv6 capable) home router with OpenBSD 7.7 (or 7.8!)

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

[When I wrote this post, I used OpenBSD 7.7. In the less-than-a-month since I posted this, OpenBSD 7.8 has been released! I’ve upgraded my router, and all the advice below is still applicable with 7.8]

I’ve just replaced our old home router with a tiny OpenBSD router, and I’ve been surprised and delighted by it.

The old router - a TEW813-DRU - was getting long in the tooth. Made in 2014, it was relieved of WiFi gateway duties when the pandemic demanded less glitchy videoconferencing than it could support¹, and was only still around because it can route full gigabit to the WAN port² - and perhaps more importantly, allows DHCP to be switched off so that our Pi-Hole can take over that task, along with DNS resolution. For a long time, it also routed IPv6 very happily - but that seemed to break somehow a year or so ago (I suspect config changes at our ISP), so we’ve been IPv4 luddites since then.

Why BSD? I guess I’d have to admit that I have an affinity for oddball setups - but I also wondered if it’d be simpler than a Linux solution. I love Linux - in fact, this router is running in a VM on a Linux system that’s also running Home Assistant (more about that in the future, perhaps), but over time distros have become super complicated. BSD has a reputation for being ‘simpler’.

Often, my oddball setups mean a bunch of wasted time and a return to the mainstream, but I’m happy to say that I do not regret this choice at all. OpenBSD is wonderful for this task. It’s small. I allocated 512MB of RAM to the VM, and it’s using 183MB of it. It’s using about 2G of disk space, without really any attempt on my part to keep it small beyond the obvious (no windowing system or games installed). Installation was super simple³.

Openbsd on Jamie Montgomerie’s World Wide Web Log

Setting up a very simple (but IPv6 capable) home router with OpenBSD 7.7 (or 7.8!)