I am not overly happy with my current firewall setup and looking into alternatives.

I previously was somewhat OK with OPNsense running on a small APU4, but I would like to upgrade from that and OPNsense feels like it is holding me back with it’s convoluted web-ui and (for me at least) FreeBSD strangeness.

I tried setting up IPfire, but I can’t get it to work reliably on hardware that runs OPNsense fine.

I thought about doing something custom but I don’t really trust myself sufficiently to get the firewall stuff right on first try. Also for things like DHCP and port forwarding a nice easy web GUI is convenient.

So one idea came up to run a normal Linux distro on the firewall hardware and set up OPNsense in a VM on it. That way I guess I could keep a barebones OPNsense around for convenience, but be more flexible on how to use the hardware otherwise.

Am I assuming correctly that if I bind the VM to hardware network interfaces for WAN and LAN respectively it should behave and be similarly secure to a bare metal firewall?

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    DNS Domain Name Service/System
    HA Home Assistant automation software
    ~ High Availability
    PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
    VPN Virtual Private Network

    4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

    [Thread #638 for this sub, first seen 28th Mar 2024, 20:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

    • Socket462@feddit.itEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      I come from VyOS and really liked it, but still prefer opnsense for the GUI, constant updates and plugins. VyOS started losing appeal once they opted for subscription stable iso access (even if they did give me a free subscription for some comment contribution in their repo). Also, I have to admit, that VyOS needs a fraction of the resources needed by opnsense.

      • TheHolm@aussie.zoneEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        Open source projects need to make money somehow. I found VyOS method quite acceptable. They giving good instruction and tools to build your own stable ISO. So do not be lazy or contribute somehow. Unfortunately their paid support costs too much. I was considering trying to push VyOS to be used as virtual router at my work, but it costs more than Cisco C8000v

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      I keep wanting to look into that one. Can it be easily extended from the Debian repositories?

  • Illecors@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    I’d been running OPNsense in a VM for some time. I used xen as a hypervisor, but that shouldn’t really be a requirement. Passed the nics through and it was golden! All the benefits of a VM - quick boot-up, snapshots on the hypervisor - it’s truly glorious :)

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Sounds great. What about hardware acceleration features of the NIC? I read somewhere that its better to disable the support for that in OPNsense when running it in a VM?

        • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
          0·
          6 months ago

          I just saw that option. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of this?

          I guess when I pass the actual NIC device the hardware acceleration should work?

          Edit: Looks like my host system does not support this, at least that is the error I get when trying ;)

          • wildbus8979@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            01·
            6 months ago

            For one you offload the entire processing and driver handling to the VM, so if the OS wants to do something funky, it can.