Hiya, looking the a firewall for my homelab, mostly to experiment but also for a added layer of security. There are just two of us in this household with a few laptops, phones and my servers, so nothing much. Therefore looking for something affordable and not “overkill”.
Anyone got any recommendations for this? Also how do you run your opensense/pfsense instance?
Appreciate any tips!
I made the jump to OPNsense recently, ended up buying a Protecli to install it on and its been working great so far. For me it sort of made sense since I wanted to have a little purpose built fanless system with Intel NICs, and Coreboot and Console access via USB are nice bonuses too. My original thinking was to try running other services on the same hardware (using Proxmox maybe) but for now it just runs OPNsense and nothing else… maybe it’s better for the network firewall to just be the network firewall, it’s the one thing I don’t want to crash and have an outage with.
But you don’t have to do that, pretty much any Intel/AMD based system with multiple Intel NICs should work with an OPNsense install. The other mini pc vendors will be a bit cheaper for sure, just be mindful of RAM and storage prices right now.
Thanls for sharing your input, i feel like im in the same boat. Want to keep networking separate from my server that has downtime and i fiddle a lot with 😅