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Running a OPNsense firewall in a VM? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 7 months ago by poVoq@slrpnk.net to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I am not overly happy with my current firewall setup and looking into alternatives.

I previously was somewhat OK with OPNsense running on a small APU4, but I would like to upgrade from that and OPNsense feels like it is holding me back with it's convoluted web-ui and (for me at least) FreeBSD strangeness.

I tried setting up IPfire, but I can't get it to work reliably on hardware that runs OPNsense fine.

I thought about doing something custom but I don't really trust myself sufficiently to get the firewall stuff right on first try. Also for things like DHCP and port forwarding a nice easy web GUI is convenient.

So one idea came up to run a normal Linux distro on the firewall hardware and set up OPNsense in a VM on it. That way I guess I could keep a barebones OPNsense around for convenience, but be more flexible on how to use the hardware otherwise.

Am I assuming correctly that if I bind the VM to hardware network interfaces for WAN and LAN respectively it should behave and be similarly secure to a bare metal firewall?

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[-] glizzyguzzler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 7 months ago

I followed some guide to put Opnsense on Proxmox. I pass through 2 NICs and set the KVM (using the Proxmox make-a-VM GUI) to be the CPU arch it runs on for that extra speed (but that setting precludes easy transfer to a new box with a different arch). Plenty fast and I run another Linux VM on the same box that does stuff I’d want Opnsense to do (DNS, VPN, etc.).

If I did it again I’d prob do LXD (Incus now), Proxmox has a long startup time and is fiddly to use (to me at least). Looks like Incus can do the same KVM thing, just with less steps and stock Debian.

this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
22 points (92.3% liked)

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