I’m a pretty novice person considering installing opnsense for my personal home use.

Their documentation has what would seem to be incomplete hardware requirement.

For example it does not list any network hardware. I assume you need at least 1 Ethernet connection. I recall reading somewhere that you might need 2 network cards? One for in and one for out?

What about network card specs? I have old computers lying around that exceed the CPU/RAM/SSD requirements but cards are practically antiques. Should I upgrade? If so, to what?

ETA: The best internet I could subscribe to where I’m at is 1024 Mbps down, 50 Mbps up. So don’t worry about wasting fibre speeds. :(

Does anyone know about a more thorough description of requirements?

  • neuromancer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    For hosting/homelab you probably want 3 network interfaces (WAN/LAN/DMZ), you can get away with only two (WAN/LAN) got it gets kinda dangerous if your server gets hacked.

    Resources depends on what you want to do, just running a router/firewall doesn’t require many resources, but running full IDS/IPS require a lot of resources.

    • imaradio@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Does “interface” mean you need separate cards? Or you have a single card with multiple interfaces?

      Is DMZ like a guest network?

      I looked up “IDS/IPS” and it wounds like something I would prefer to avoid doing if I can.

        • imaradio@lemmy.caOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I was hoping to make use of one of the various computers I have cluttering this place up so I could justify continuing the collection. ;)

          Do you know how to determine suitability of an existing card, or how to correctly purchase a replacement?

          • neuromancer@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            I think most server cards will work.

            You can run it in a VM, I’m using an Intel I350-T4 in my VMware server, never had any issues with it.

            • imaradio@lemmy.caOPEnglish
              11·
              1 year ago

              What’s a server card?

              I’d prefer to avoid VMs if possible I never had much luck with them.

          • floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            You can buy multi-port Intel ethernet cards cheap on eBay. But a used one and drop it into your computer. If you stick to Intel you should have a better time with driver support under OPNsense, and it would enable you to have separate ports for VLANs if you wanted to get fancy.

      • MilderRichter@feddit.deEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        DMZ is usually where you put servers that should be externally accessible

        it’s like a guest network in that it is a separate network segment with different filtering/forwarding rules than the main local network