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OpnSense Advice?

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fields987

Regular Contributor
I currently have an Asus RT-AX88U acting as my edge device with AiProtection and Skynet both enabled. I'm toying with the idea of using OPNSense as my edge device and switching my AX88U to bridge mode. I have played around with OPNSense in my virtual lab so I think it will do what i want. My questions are:

Any OPNSense users - any gotchas I should be aware of?

If I want to be cheap and add an intel based dual nic pcie card to my windows 10 pc and run OPNSense as a vm, would that work? Or do I need to shell out for dedicated hardware?

Thanks!
 
No experience with OPNSense but am running pfSense for more than a year now and very happy about it. There are some recent threads that talk about OPNSense vs pfSense.
 
I have used both Pfsense and OpenSense, and just recently trying Opnsense out again. If you asked me before 21.1 Marvelous Meerkat came out, I would of said it still has some quirks and minor issues they need to work out. Now running 21.1.1 update and it is running smooth and nicely. This version is about optimizations and stability and it recognized all my Network cards including the newer 2.5Gbps dual NIC card I have in there. I also noticed this go around it nearly eliminated the Bridge cosmetic issue I was seeing with error outs. Still there but not I can run speed test for instance and I am not generating false error out errors that was happening on prior version and in Pfsense like crazy. Also seems throughput was also improved. The install might of been the easiest as 21.1 just worked and the config wizard did everything else I needed out of the box with minimum effort. The previous version and the current version of Pfsense would take extra work and configuration to sometimes work out of the box effortlessly.

Now the only thing I do really miss in Pfsense is the Traffic Shaper (QOS) Wizard. It made things a lot easier. However Opnsense, had the entire Traffic Shaper re-written and it will gain a wizard eventually from what I seee in the forums. Luckily I was able to figure out the configuration enough, that I have put my own QOS Traffic Shaper rules into place.

Overall this version seems to be more of a polishing and stability update, and from what they are saying, this year even with the next big bang update, will be about optimizations and stability improvements. You also can get weekly security patches, and there are several plugins that can add value to Opnsense, such as Sensei and clamAV, which I am using.

I would highly recommend a seperate contained system for production use with min 4GB memory but would recommend 8GB+. Hypervisors can be good for testing and such, but if you run it as a virtual desktop, you will not get the full benefit of what the software can do, and there may be extra setup needed.

Hope this helps.
 

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