Finally ditched my ISP’s router and installed my own opnsense firewall with my own Access Point. I have crowdsec running on opnsense to block attacks + adguard to block ads and malicious domains. My network is segmented between my homelab that is exposed and my AP.
Finally feels quite safe in my network 😅
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Networking isn’t my strong suit, so this might be a stupid question. But what exactly is a hardware firewall? Is it the same thing as my Internet facing router blocking incoming packets which haven’t been requested from “inside the home” network?
A hardware firewall generally indicates a standalone appliance that is dedicated to being a firewall. Not to be confused with a software firewall as you would see with UFW, or Windows Defender. Modern routers do possess some of the same tenets of a hardware firewall, but a dedicated hardware firewall usually gives a broader range of defenses such as IDS/IPS, filtering, etc.
I have a dedicated hardware firewall in the form of pFsense. The ‘black box’ in OP’s picture is the hardware firewall.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point DNS Domain Name Service/System IP Internet Protocol IoT Internet of Things for device controllers
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
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That looks exactly like the box I grabbed. Are you running your opnsense on the bare metal, or are you virtualizing it? My only regret for mine was not picking up more ram.
I’m running on bare metal. I have a physical homelab behind. Can’t you add ram?
I could, if it wasn’t so damn expensive for 32gb
I can’t imagine why you need 32gb for opnsense. I can run it on a single core and 1gb, unless I literally want every DNS blacklist loaded in which case 4gb
I’m running a proxmox instance on mine, with opnsense in a vm and plex, Jellyfin pihole and my omada controller on lxc. 16gb is just enough for everything, but I like to future proof and buffer things, so it makes me a bit nervous utilizing 12 of that 16 gb and only leaving 4gb for proxmox.
In some places you can still get 32GB DDR4 for a kidney if you‘re lucky.
I’ve had pretty good fortune with https://www.memorystock.com/
I will get them a look
OP, you may want to look into ntopng. I think opnsense has a ntopng plugin. I find it very useful for traffic analysis.
Will have a look, thanks!
I have crowdsec running on opnsense to block attacks
Crowdsec is a pretty good package. It does blocking, but is geared more to being an IDS. Opnsense supports Suricata which is a more aggressive, and all encompassing IDS/IPS. I don’t think opnsense supports it’s cousin Snort.
I considered suricata but for now I think crowdsec works well enough, I’ll see later if I think suricata could be more useful
Cool, cool. I was just throwing it out there if you hadn’t considered it. It’s quite a powerful package.
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Looks like one of the qotom/topton boxes you can find on aliexpress.
Can also pick them up with preinstalled *sense from Protectli (which I did I regretted nothing, totally great experience.)
Indeed it’s a topton mini pc/firewall. It’s costs 300€ on AliExpress :) I removed Pfsense and installed opnsense
Is that pretty standard a price for a standalone firewall?
It’s the most cost effective I found that had a decent CPU and multiple Ethernet ports. I was not able to find a local alternative in the same form factor
Good to know. Thank you 🙏
Share some pictures and stats of you could. Do u see many probes?
You want pictures and stats of what?
Cats, if you have them, dogs if not.
Why crowdsec?
Personal preference, it’s what I’ve been using since I started my homelab and I think it works well enough.
Are you exposing things to the internet?
Yes
Nice.
Running different SSIDs too?
I put all my IoT stuff on a dedicated 2.4-only network, VLANd it to the (pfsense) firewall which allows the VLAN trunk to be split into separate logical NICs that I apply different policies to, like no access to the internet, etc…
At the moment I only have one WiFi instance, not planning to separate yet but it could be a future upgrade since I have a few IoT devices.
