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?

  • imaradioOPEnglish
    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.

      • imaradioOPEnglish
        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?

        • floofloofEnglish
          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.

          • imaradioOPEnglish
            11·
            1 year ago

            What’s a server card?

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

    • 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

      • imaradioOPEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        that sounds useful.

        i like to keep things separate when plausible.