this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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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?

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[–] mb_@lemm.ee 1 points 7 months ago

I can't remember all the details, but depending on the CPU you are running you may need some extra configuration on opnsense.

There were a few issues, on my servers, running on older Intel Xeon CPUs, but I eventually fixed them adding proper flags to deal with different bugs.

Other than that, running on a VM is really handy.