Recommendations for OPNsense box?

Loganx1121 · September 29, 2019

So I need a firewall for my home lab and settled on OPNsense. I got a Dell recoverpoint box from work. 4 NICS, 12GB of RAM, 2x Six Core E5-2620, 2x 300GB HDD. I had planned on using this as the OPNsense box...but...I feel like it's overkill. I also feel like it's going jack my electric bill up.

So, I'm looking for recommendations. I was going to buy an appliance, but everyone keeps telling me I can build something better for the same money. Been browsing around newegg but I honestly have no idea what I need for what I want to do. If it was a normal server build I could spec it myself but it kind of isn't so looking for some insight.

Here's what I'd like to do:

Gig throughput for traffic (routing) + Gig throughput NAT
I'm probably going to want to play with the IPS features too, i.e have IPS turned on and still be able to achieve the above speeds
IPSEC VPN <-- 100 Mbps to 200Mbps is fine. This is more convenience for friends and myself to access my NAS, etc.

So it looks like some of the pfsense appliance that claim to be able to route a gig are $400-600. I've been looking at some Xeon processors that are in the 200-250 range like this https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16819117616

But I honestly don't have a clue what I need. I've built dozens of desktops off newegg for myself and others but never tried anything like this.

Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Electronics Wizardy · September 29, 2019

Do you have a server already? Id be tempted to just run it in a vm on a existing server, you can use that dual xeon box you have for that.

Do you have a rack? id be tempted to go dell r2x0 if you want rack mount.

Id stay away from that xeon, go used if your not getting a current gen xeon.

Otherwise, id go with a used buiness desktop with something like a 4th cpu, somethinglike a optiplex 7020

Loganx1121 · September 29, 2019

I have a small rack but it's full of my cisco equipment. I have a "server" that was my old desktop and I just re-purposed it. It's currently doing FTP and running my XMPP server, as well as a few VM's that I just toy around with. It's a i7 6700k 4 GHz, 16 GB 2133 MHz RAM, SSD and mechanical drive inside. Just the one NIC but...I kinda want to keep my firewall in a separate box. This box is already doing things, plus it's about 4 years old now I think. I don't want a single point of failure for everything.

Also I'd like to stay away from doing the Firewall on a VM. I feel like that could get weird/complicated with the virtual interfaces. Rather just have a box and physical NICS.