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?

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    thanks for all the info!

    i am definitely a person who will always change the defaults for no particular reason. so I appreciate the warning. except I don’t quite know what you mean by “assignments”. do you mean like the names? eth0? or their functions? I do like the idea of having a physical jack that’s always guaranteed to allow access no matter what I foul up otherwise.

    all these years I have been running my home network with a collection of routers just kind of attached together in a way that shouldn’t work due to “double nat” according to everything I ever read, but it is pretty much functional if not at all optimized. maybe if you don’t believe in double nat it won’t happen to you.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      I’ve done crazy things and never had an issue with double nat. But that’s all on small networks.

      Assignment as in what opnsense is aware of.
      Whether that is a physical NIC (NICs aren’t assigned by default), virtual NICs (IE multiple vlans on a physical nic), or PPPoE/PPPoA/whatever

      Watch a video of the install process, then watch a video of assigning additional interfaces.
      They will be able to explain and show it to you better than I can type!