Submitted 3 days ago by alvaro@social.graves.cl to selfhosted@lemmy.world
Any recommendation for a cheap, small #firewall for my #homelab ? I realized I can’t control easily what goes out of my network only via DNS block lists
Cc @selfhosted@lemmy.world @selfhost@lemmy.ml
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m doing opnsense on a protectli
Pfsense. I’m a purist.
In that case OPNsense does the exact same thing but with a more intuative GUI. It original was a fork of pfSense.
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.
@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.
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 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.
Dlwrx36 flashed to openwrt should serve you nicely on gigabit ethernet
What are you wanting?
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
LiPoly@lemmynsfw.com 11 hours ago
MikroTik is very affordable and can be configured quite extensively.