Any recommendation for a cheap, small #firewall for my #homelab ? I realized I can’t control easily what goes out of my network only via DNS block lists
I have an N100 box for my router and it’s great for singe gigabit or less. But > 1gbit and you really quickly need some serious hardware.
At work I was using a VM with 2 cores from a xeon 4215 and it struggled to get anything more than 2 gbit. As soon as I bumped it up to 4 cores I was able to get the full 4gbit speeds. If I wanted to do any traffic shaping or packet inspection speeds would tank. Also my OpenVPN speeds kinda suck on this N100 device. They’re never great, but I can definitely tell I’m getting CPU bound vs when I ran it on my server. So if you plan on running extra services don’t expect the greatest performance.
A lot of networking traffic is single core dependent so I’ve been trying to find one of those weird 5 core machines with 1 P core and 4 E cores which I think would be the perfect fit.
Look up some mini n100 boxes. More than enough to do what you need. I think Minisforum is selling refurb units now.
This. N100 box with Opnsense will serve you well for a decade+ until you want to upgrade to 10gbps.
I have an N100 box for my router and it’s great for singe gigabit or less. But > 1gbit and you really quickly need some serious hardware.
At work I was using a VM with 2 cores from a xeon 4215 and it struggled to get anything more than 2 gbit. As soon as I bumped it up to 4 cores I was able to get the full 4gbit speeds. If I wanted to do any traffic shaping or packet inspection speeds would tank. Also my OpenVPN speeds kinda suck on this N100 device. They’re never great, but I can definitely tell I’m getting CPU bound vs when I ran it on my server. So if you plan on running extra services don’t expect the greatest performance.
A lot of networking traffic is single core dependent so I’ve been trying to find one of those weird 5 core machines with 1 P core and 4 E cores which I think would be the perfect fit.