Start making sense

At work we use pf on freebsd for our firewalls. I have been re-learning it as my freebsd-firewall experience is over 2 decades old. At home and in the colo we have been using openwrt which is great but a real pain to keep updated and deploy. I have been looking at pfsense and in the process, I discovered opnsense. If my BSD/PF chops ever get good enough I may go to straight freebsd but the convenience of guided configuration of a secure system is hard to ignore [1]

The hardware

As I was considering looking at pfsense I scored a pair of routers with 6x1G ports, and room for a pair of ssds.

miskitty

First thing I did was to pull the os disk and replace it with a 1T ssd and upgrade the memory. The second thing I did was to replace the fans with quieter ones and print a pair of noise reducing mufflers. (I should blog about this on suspect devices at some point)

After that I installed opensense and started working on my list of things to do.

The goal: Consolidate home network using OPNSense

[x] REMOVE openwrt router
[x] REMOVE dedicated caching server (Done)
[x] REMOVE dedicated dnsmasq server
[ ] REMOVE (that f**king centurylink router)
[x] KEEP Pihole-FTL dns based blacklisting
[ ] ADD Better firewall rules
[ ] ADD VPN acces to home network
[ ] ADD Isolated Wireless network for solar array controller.

Footnotes/Sarcasms

1). On the other hand having a gui make things easier makes it easy to break things and less easy to debug them. (having managed to brick the home network trying to add an isolated wireless network)