At work, as an engineer, I have been able to find answers to obscure problems very quickly and easily via Kagi. To me that is easily worth spending $10 a month, rather than spending hours digging through junk on Google or DDG to find what I’m looking for (or never find it in some cases).
Not really sure what your use case is here, but from a security perspective (and speaking as a network engineer), I would highly suggest you run a firewall/router on a separate device.
Any reason you don’t want to use something like OPNsense?
No problem, happy to help! Figured this might be the case, since I run into this situation a lot at work.
Are they Windows PCs? If so, Windows firewall blocks pings by default.
Definitely spot on for network engineering.