I’m a pretty novice person considering installing opnsense for my personal home use.

Their documentation has what would seem to be incomplete hardware requirement.

For example it does not list any network hardware. I assume you need at least 1 Ethernet connection. I recall reading somewhere that you might need 2 network cards? One for in and one for out?

What about network card specs? I have old computers lying around that exceed the CPU/RAM/SSD requirements but cards are practically antiques. Should I upgrade? If so, to what?

ETA: The best internet I could subscribe to where I’m at is 1024 Mbps down, 50 Mbps up. So don’t worry about wasting fibre speeds. :(

Does anyone know about a more thorough description of requirements?

  • @ag10nEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    I have mine setup on a Supermicro itx-based machine with an Intel n3710 and 8G of RAM. It has four Intel-based ports but you can easily get away with two.

    I used to run a Zotac ci323 with dual Realtek nics. Works fine for 300M up/down.

    You’ll want two ports, one for WAN one for LAN and most nics will support VLANs if you need more than that. Any VPN or encryption will increase your cpu requirements. If your needs are low a cheap dual-nic Nuc like device works great.