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?

  • gray@pawb.socialEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    If you have a managed switch you can also just do vlan tags for your wan and not have to pass any nics to the VM.

    • poVoqOPAEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Yeah, I though about that, but that sounds like a footgun waiting to happen.

      • gray@pawb.socialEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        I’ve been doing it for years, no issues. It’s fairly common in the enterprise as well.