OPNsense Forum

English Forums => Hardware and Performance => Topic started by: ljrickwood on January 12, 2019, 01:28:22 am

Title: Experience building opnsense firewall on via mini-ITX mainboard
Post by: ljrickwood on January 12, 2019, 01:28:22 am
I recently built a home/SOHO firewall box around OPNSense, a VIA VB7009 mini-ITX board (https://www.viatech.com/en/boards/mini-itx/vb7009 (https://www.viatech.com/en/boards/mini-itx/vb7009)) and an Intel quad-port Ethernet PCI card. I'm recording the experience here in the hope that others might find it useful.

Long story short - OPNSense installed on the hardware and works well. It currently manages five subnets, using the four Ethernet ports on the  Intel NIC and one of the two ports on the mainboard itself.
The details;
And now, the caveats;
To conclude; OPNSense works on a VB7009 but the paucity of suitable quad-port NICs limits it to situations in which a maximum of four ports is required (2 on the board plus a dual-port NIC). Similarly, it's limited to relatively low-traffic deployments. For situations requiring a quad NIC and/or high traffic a better mini-ITX option would be the VIA EPIA-M920 (https://www.viatech.com/en/boards/mini-itx/epia-m920/ (https://www.viatech.com/en/boards/mini-itx/epia-m920/)). The M920 costs about twice as much as the VB7009 but has a PCIe bus - making suitable NICs easier to find - and supports fan-less Eden CPUs - allowing it handle heavier traffic. In all cases, and regardless of the number of ports, use a NIC with an Intel chipset to avoid a lot of aggravation.