pfsense running on whatever hardware that doesn’t use too much power
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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Or opnSense
Or OpenWRT on a thrift store Linksys
I can’t recommend pfSense enough.
OPNsense on any small scale dual LAN box, either a used mini PC or a purpose made one.
I bought a refurbished SFF PC and put a PCIe NIC in it. Installed opnSense.
Cheap as chips. Supremely powerful.
Any pc with two network ports and Ipfire will do. Easy to set up and configure.
Go on ebay and look for refurbished PCs, it'll probably be cheaper than buying a wireless router. It'll take some setup but you will get the configurability you need, in spades.
Not necessarily the most performant setup depending on hardware. You want something that has a enough bandwidth.
I don't know what kind of specs you're looking for for your system, but I've been very happy with my netgate.
Though it's still close to $200 for the lowest model, but comes with support if your not really sure what your doing.
Netgate 1100 $189
No link posted because I didn't look at the rules for this community.
Seconded. Not the cheapest solution, but worth the price.
I bought this Protectli Vault FW2B , and installed OPNSense strictly for firewall since I don't control the router in my town home.
I used this guide to set up a transparent bridge so I can filter out traffic before it gets to the subnet my property manager assigned to me.
Setting it up was a great learning experience. One thing that was odd for me though, was that I had to change the label of the interfaces in the ui to match the label on the hardware.
We probably need more details as to what exactly you're attempting to accomplish and how you're attempting to accomplish it.
The main issue is that each rule you add to a firewall has a performance penalty: each packet is checked against each rule before it's passed.
Ten rules require 10x more cpu than 1 rule, 100 rules need 10x more than 10 rules, and so on.
Depending on how much traffic and how many rules we're talking about and what kind of expectation you have for performance as well as anything else (eg. vpn endpoint), "small and cheap" may not be fast enough, and you might have to lean into higher performance hardware.
They’re not checked against every rule. First pass it stops.
Yeah, maybe could have been clearer.
I was very vividly remembering a VERY SMART client I had a while ago that had like 600 rules blocking all manner of ports and protocols and IPs, and wondering why everything performed like dogshit.
Sure, it'll go until it hits the first match, but if you have enough rules, you're going to be churning through an awful lot of cpu getting everything to the first match.
OP may not have been intending to do something quite that uh, special, but people do funky things.
Look up some mini n100 boxes. More than enough to do what you need. I think Minisforum is selling refurb units now.
This. N100 box with Opnsense will serve you well for a decade+ until you want to upgrade to 10gbps.
I have an N100 box for my router and it's great for singe gigabit or less. But > 1gbit and you really quickly need some serious hardware.
At work I was using a VM with 2 cores from a xeon 4215 and it struggled to get anything more than 2 gbit. As soon as I bumped it up to 4 cores I was able to get the full 4gbit speeds. If I wanted to do any traffic shaping or packet inspection speeds would tank. Also my OpenVPN speeds kinda suck on this N100 device. They're never great, but I can definitely tell I'm getting CPU bound vs when I ran it on my server. So if you plan on running extra services don't expect the greatest performance.
A lot of networking traffic is single core dependent so I've been trying to find one of those weird 5 core machines with 1 P core and 4 E cores which I think would be the perfect fit.
@alvaro @selfhosted @selfhost
For a homelab I'd look into OpenBSD's PF
Pfsense is built on this, but it has some free software issues.
OpnSense was a pfsense fork from some of them original creators, that is free software.
Both are fantastic.
Pfsense. I'm a purist.
In that case OPNsense does the exact same thing but with a more intuative GUI. It originally was a fork of pfSense.
I'd agree the OPNsense UI is probably more intuitive if you've never touched PFSense but I found the OPNsense UI difficult coming from many years of PF.
Which is why I said that I'm a purist. But whatever works, they're both worth exploring. I got dug-in on my solution a decade ago and haven't really had a reason to change once I learned it.
Cus there isnt a reason to change if you are already super familiar with pfSense. They basically do the same stuff.
One has ego issues and shitty code issues.
If you're considering building your own firewall, you've started down a long path of homelabbing. I'd encourage you to start with a proper setup and allow yourself plenty of room to grow. You want your setup to be extensible, and the firewall is just the beginning.
I'd grab at least a 15U rack and a Dell poweredge R210. Throw in a gigabit nic and install OPNsense. You'll have room for your switches, NAS, UPS, etc... later.
I basically did the same, picked up a 12U rack and a Dell R220 as my PfSense box.
Been so stable and can handle anything.
I'm doing opnsense on a protectli
What are you wanting?
Dlwrx36 flashed to openwrt should serve you nicely on gigabit ethernet
I've been using an R210ii with PFSense for like 8 years now. It's been rock solid and only sips like 20 watts.
MikroTik is very affordable and can be configured quite extensively.
I can recommend the nanopi r4s, supported by openwrt, ipfire and I think opnsense. Ive been using it as my main router for almost a year now on a symmetric 1Gb connection. Best part is it's super cheap and tiny
I just have a small Sophos Firewall at home, it does the job very well, but its a little expensive compared to free versions.
I get it for free because i do business with them.
Would you mind to elaborate a bit more about your experience witht he sophos?
I got a reused xgs115 a few months ago and I found the experience not so pleasant. The device lags a lot with the web page interface, the learning curve is steep in my opinion and I have problems to setup some services in a reliable way (they tends to hangs up, but this is perhaps my own problem)
Do you know by chance if they are able to have the Ds-lite tunnel for an ipv6 to ipv4 working?
Huh? The interface lagged? Wow, im doing remote "maintenance" on these for companies, I've never had such a problem, even with the smallest one.
The setup is a little work to get into, but Sophos does have a very good wiki for everything, the help button does actually help for them, and if not the support is always helpful even for seemingly small problems. They also have their own forum where you can get help for specific problems from the community
For the ipv6 to ipv4 problem, i doubt its capable of that, you probably need an extra system for that, i haven't run into that issues myself but i seriously doubt it, even for the bigger ones and clusters.
OK, thanks for the feedback. Perhaps I am doing something terrible wrong with it.
I will recheck the system again.
Thanks
When the interface laggs it sounds like it needs a firmware update or its just faulty as i said, I've not seen such a problem as described myself.