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I moved over to OPNSense, after using pfSense for a long while, and I hit the same problem which I also initially hit with recent releases of pfSense. The N5105 doesn't play nicely with "modern" power saving, so you have to forcibly disable that and tell it to use old fashioned PowerD power management instead.

In the /boot/loader.conf.local file add:

hint.hwpstate_intel.0.disabled=1

And reboot. Mine dropped from high 80sC to 40s after rebooting.

Big thanks from me, as well. Works brilliantly, just need to find some push buttons that fit the holes better now.

2. See https://github.com/opnsense/update#opnsense-bootstrap -- installing FreeBSD 12.1 ZFS and installing OPNsense afterwards. You can even drop the preconfigured config to /conf/config.xml so it'll bootstrap right into the final config. It's not a super-tedious procedure.

3. Need more infos on APU4 "fiddly and time consuming", also which OPNsense version (up to 20.1 maybe?) misbehaved. Maybe someone else can share their experience with the box.

Hey! Thanks for the quick reply. 2 is what I did in my test run, but as the APU4 is headless you need to do it via the serial console, and the bog standard 12.1 doesn't seem to want to do that! So I had to go through these steps to get the initial install of FreeBSD 12.1 to install. Once I'd gone through that several times due to missing a step I used the script you linked to and it installed 21.1r1.

Compared to the pfSense way of getting ZFS with serial, pop in USB stick and install, it is fiddly.

Likewise, I'm looking at whether to move from pfSense.  I do like the interface, it is a lot easier to navigate than pfSense.

My "problems" are few, but showstoppers for me at the moment.

1. Migrating settings from pfSense - if major chunks like DHCP allocations & Suricata config could be imported, it would make life a lot easier

2. File system... Early last year when I was choosing between Opnsense and pfSense it came down to one thing, UFS. I had crashes/lockups on both systems (my fault working out what things did) that required a hard reset. pfSense's ZFS option made that painless, I did on more than one occasion have crashes big enough to totally stuff up parts of the system, especially making Sensei's database crash beyond repair. Looking at the forums it seems there still isn't an easy way to use ZFS on Opnsense, the best suggestion being installing BSD 12.x first to set it up, then run a set up script to convert it. Is that still the case?

3. PCEngine APU4. I did recently purchase one of these and set it up with pfSense after earlier running it on a spare Mac mini. Setting up the APU4 on pfSense was painless. Doing a test run of Opnsense was fiddly and time consuming involving having to make a boot disc, mount it, fiddle with settings in boot.config and loader.conf, install, then make sure to make the same changes to the new install before you dare to reboot, etc... Has that improved in the 21.1?