Building A Router from Scratch with Debian 12

An Ansible playbook that builds a router from scratch on Debian 12 in one command.

This repo is the implementation of my blog post.

How to Run

Clone this repo and open in an IDE. Use global find and replace to substitute the following fields:

• TIMEZONE_TO_BE_FILLED: e.g. America/Chicago
• WAN_PORT_TO_BE_FILLED: the WAN port you want your router to use. e.g. enp1s0
• LAN_PORTS_LIST: the LAN ports you want you router to use. e.g. enp2s0 enp3s0 enp4s0
• ULA_PREFIX_TO_BE_FILLED: the ULA prefix you want to use in your LAN. e.g. fd00::. Do not put /64 as it is in the config files already.
• Go to roles/router/tasks/conf/interfaces. Replace these commented lines with your LAN ports:

  # TODO: replace the following with your LAN ports
  # up ip link set enp2s0 up
  # up ip link set enp3s0 up
  # up ip link set enp4s0 up

• Go to inventory/group_vars/all/vars.yaml and replace the user name with your preferred user name the router will use.
• By default the Pi-hole admin portal is on port 8765. Search and replace to whatever port you like.

The Ansible configuration is now done.

Perform a fresh install of Debian 12 on your future router. Give the user sudo privilege. Configure the router to have the static IP 192.168.0.1 on one of the LAN interfaces so that you can connect to it via ssh. Plug the WAN cable in the WAN port and configure it to use DHCP so the machine has Internet access. Install python3 and openssh-server on the machine.

$ sudo apt install openssh-server python3

Copy the ssh keys of your Ansible host to the router. You are good to go. Just run Ansible and it will be done.

$ ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts playbooks/router/main.yaml -K