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Running a OPNsense firewall in a VM? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the quick reply.

What about the LAN side: Can I bridge that adapter to the internal network of the VM host somehow to avoid an extra hop to the main switch and back via another network port?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

May depend on your hypervisor, but generally yes. Should be able to give the VM a virtual NIC in addition to the two physical ones you bind, and it shouldn't care about the difference when you create a LAN bridge interface.

Depending on your setup/layout, either enable spanning tree or watch out for potential bridge loops, though.