pfsense running on whatever hardware that doesn’t use too much power
Or opnSense
Or OpenWRT on a thrift store Linksys
I can’t recommend pfSense enough.
I bought a refurbished SFF PC and put a PCIe NIC in it. Installed opnSense.
Cheap as chips. Supremely powerful.
OPNsense on any small scale dual LAN box, either a used mini PC or a purpose made one.
Any pc with two network ports and Ipfire will do. Easy to set up and configure.
Not necessarily the most performant setup depending on hardware. You want something that has a enough bandwidth.
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.
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.
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.
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’m doing opnsense on a protectli
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.
Dlwrx36 flashed to openwrt should serve you nicely on gigabit ethernet
What are you wanting?
@alvaro @selfhosted @selfhost
For a homelab I’d look into OpenBSD’s PFPfsense 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.
I’ve been using an R210ii with PFSense for like 8 years now. It’s been rock solid and only sips like 20 watts.
