Grab a decent microtik router and a few Ubiquiti Unifi AP's, setup automatic updates, and never touch them again.
If you're looking for a router that's never had a documented security flaw, you're probably going to buy a no-name brand that's full of them (because no one's looked yet, so it has a "clean" record).
The factors that you really need to look for are 1) good engineering practices for security, and 2) prompt and effective response to flaws. 1) can hard to verify completely, but you can get a sense of 2) based on patch cycles.
I have a Mikrotik router at home, and I chose it because their products are inexpensive and aimed at professionals, which means the software support is much better than consumer routers. Mine is quite old, but it still gets patches.
- Ubiquiti has a track record of GPL violations (e.g. u-boot which dovetails nicely with a security vuln)
- The Unifi AP is tolerable for a simple home env but not much else.
- Ubiquiti support is non-existent. They basically slapped a slick GUI on Vyatta and resold it. It's nice, but they don't have much in the way of developers. So, for instance, they still haven't fixed the hardware acceleration bugs in the ER-X or the WPA2 enterprise issues in the Unifi AP.
- Ubiquiti hardware itself is hit and miss. The ER-L, for instance, is known to overheat and cook itself to death. There was a mixup with some of the PoE stuff (UBNT historically used non-standard PoE) meaning you're not entirely sure what's in the box.
UBNT hardware cheap and you can hack on it, so that's nice. But, being aimed at professionals and actually suitable for professionals are two separate issues.
I don't have much going on with my router, a few open ports, blocked domains and its running a L2TP over IPsec VPN for when I want to access my home IP cams.
I bought the older RB2011UiAS-RM years ago for work to replace their two crappy BT business hubs and setup dual DSL failover with a 3G dongle as a backup. I've never had to reboot any of them due to a malfunction or crash, they just keep going and the performance is top notch for the medium size business they're servicing.
I have a dell optiplex 780. I paid $15 for a second nic. It's great.
unless you pay for your own power. An edge router lite uses <10w.
How much does it cost to run the pfsense box over the course of 2 years?
So 36 bucks a year versus 8 bucks per year for the ERL.
https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeRouter/CPU-fan-mod-cpu-tem...
It will? No, that implies it is inevitably going to happen with every device which is not the case. A better wording is it might, depending on (unclear) circumstances.
At those temperatures (40C exterior temp at idle) cooking to death is pretty certain. Look at the complaints of glitchy ERLs as a proxy for impending death. Meanwhile it's pretty clear that the Octeon runs hot and UBNT didn't provide sufficient cooling.
I don't know how flexible they are though, RouterOS might be a bit of a pig to use but it can do pretty much anything you want, the Ubiquiti gear is very user friendly and that usually means less flexible.
If you want to, you can SSH into the machines. The disabled bash completion will bring you back to the 80s and reevaluate how "user friendly" it is (it does work as root, but then you gotta be root all the time...). I call this part of user-friendliness, and not in a positive way.
Regardless, I'm happy with the Ubiquity gear I got. The entry level hardware is cheap yet good quality. If you want the more advanced stuff, that's expensive though. 16 port managed switch with PoE costs nearly 300 EUR while 8 port costs 100 EUR.