I have FreedomBox up and running on a Raspberry Pi 1. With port forwarding on ports 80 and 443, everything seems to work OK. When I go to my external facing IP I get the freedombox login, and the rest of my network has internet access.
Issue is: with all traffic routing through Raspberry Pi, my connection is slow with this setup.
Is there a way to have my setup go: modem->router-> one outlet to Freedom box, one outlet to wifi router? So that the Raspberry Pi is still ‘live’ but the rest of my LAN has a clean connection out?
No. Port forwarding only applies to unsolicited traffic hitting the router.
Other traffic received in response to a query from your side is correctly routed to the initiating device, not the pi. A simple way to test this is to disconnect the pi from the network and navigate to a website. If you can access it, the port forwarding cannot be running through the pi to serve you the webpage you visited.
(Note, for this test to work the best, you should visit a site you have never been to previously to prevent cached files from being served- just in case)
Look in your Networks configuration page. This example is a router configuration.
FreedomBox Internet Connectivity
The following best describes how your FreedomBox is connected in your network. This information is used only to suggest necessary configuration actions.
Your FreedomBox is directly connected to the Internet and all your devices connect to FreedomBox for their Internet connectivity.
Your Internet Connection Type
The following best describes the type of Internet connection provided by your ISP. This information is only used to suggest you necessary configuration actions.
My ISP provides a public IP address that may change over time.
This would route traffic through your Freedombox if your Freedombox is connected to your router through eno1 and connected to your home network through eno2.
It sounds like you want
FreedomBox Internet Connectivity: Connected to a router
Your FreedomBox gets its Internet connection from your router via Wi-Fi or Ethernet cable. This is a typical home setup.
Plug FreedomBox into router port #1. Plug home wifi into router port #2. If you only have one port on your router you’ll need to put an ethernet switch between the router and your freedombox/home wifi…
Internet → router → ethernet switch port #1 → freedombox
Internet → router → ethernet switch port #2 → home wifi
Then confirm that DHCP is coming from where you think it is - FreedomBox has the capability to do DHCP but I expect this would be disabled if it is not the router. Your router would need to port forward :80 and :443 to your freedombox for you to have external access. You may add SSH port :22 to your forward list to freedombox if you are a command line user, but you can get to a remote shell through Cockpit that works nicely.