5 things nobody told me about building my own firewall

Keeping your home network or home lab safe is essential to securing private data and your personal devices. While I've got a prebuilt hardware firewall on my main network these days, my home lab often has a custom firewall built to test plugins and new configurations. It's a good way to learn cybersecurity best practices, how intrusion detection and intrusion prevention systems (IDS/IPS) work together to spot unauthorized traffic, and how networking works underneath it all.