Free Nas Firewall

[Iron05]

Hello, i have build a NAS with Free Nas and wanted to set up a firewall. On google i couldnt find any helpfull informations.

Does anyone know a way to setup a firewall or know where to find this information?

[Sprawlie]

13 hours ago, Iron05 said:

Hello, i have build a NAS with Free Nas and wanted to set up a firewall. On google i couldnt find any helpfull informations.

Does anyone know a way to setup a firewall or know where to find this information?

Yes: But it’s complicated to do effective firewalls (especially free) virtually

 

I have done a pFsense Virtual Firewall on unRAID. And no, I found very little information on the web to do it well. I ran into numerous issues that I needed trial and error to get through.

 

your biggest problem is that most of the free HyperVisors like Free NAS and UnRAID have really horrible built in virtual networking. And Firewalls like OpenSense and pFsense are BSD based, with very limited network card driver support. And almost zero virtual network driver support.

 

First you will need dedicated network interfaces for your firewall. Trying to trunk everything through a single physical NIC is TECHNICALLY possible but fucking around with the VLANs and stuff, was just not worth it

 

Also, No USB NIC’s. I tested a few and had zero luck. Only onboard, or PCI-E based NIC’s. if you can, Get a multi-port Intel based one. between my realtek one and my Intel one. The intel one was easiest to get working with “ok” performance (I never managed to get full Gigabit speed on my VM based firewall)

 

If you’re going to map the NIC’s virtually (I had to do this on unRAID, couldn’t just pass the nic through due to IOMMU), you must use VMxnet3 driver. VirtIO straight up will not work.

 

this SHOULD allow your virtual firewall to at least boot and install. 

 

Firewalls as VM’s also come with a caveat of their own. Keep in mind that if the VM is not running, the host reboots or is shut down due  something like a power outage, you’ll loose network functionality, which might include services needed to easily reach the virtual machine host.