With all the gov’t attacks on privacy these days I’ve been thinking about getting my own router. I’ve never done it and am pretty new to network stuff overall. I certainly welcome any recommendations for routers but I mainly have a stupid question:
Is it as simple as just swapping out the isp router? I’ve disconnected anything I had exposed to the internet and use LAN only right now so none of my old port forwarding rules are needed.
Correct. The box your ISP gives you almost certainly has both a modem and a wifi router. You put this box in “bridge” mode, which means it’s only serving as a modem/pipe connector. It just hands all the traffic over to your OpenWRT router.
Internet <->Modem(bridge)<->wifi router(OpenWRT)