Partition or not?

[tbone56]

I have just purchased a miniPC with 512gb SSD and installed OPNSense on it.

I see that OPNSense is only using 1gb of the disk.

The box is capable of a lot more, and I'm wondering if I should try to create another disk partition to install other software or just install to the main disk.

Maybe docker containers or something along those lines.

What would be the safest approach?
Thanks.

[meyergru]

Usually, a firewall is a 24/7 appliance. Booting another OS or application renders OpnSense inactive. Although OpnSense is build upon FreeBSD, you should refrain from using non-supported applications under OpnSense, which would include Docker.

The only way this would work is by using a virtualisation platform to run OpnSense itself alongside other VMs. And in that case, 512 GB seems fairly small. You should also consider that logs, snapshots and updates will fill up your disk in due time. Mine is at 15.5 GB right now.

[yourfriendarmando]

You could put a stock FreeBSD on it, complete with its own EFI partition, then make that a sort of rescue OS for it.

I already put a copy of Memtest86+ with grub on it. The latest release, along with editing the grub.cfg file. It is now possible to enable the serial console to give it some diagnostic ability in a headless environment.

Still all of the above would still fit on a much smaller SSD. I might swap it out for an ssd of 128G or less.

Cheers

[OPNenthu]

Maybe you'll decide that 512GB is just too much to waste, but a benefit of having a good amount of unused space in general is that it extends the service life of the SSD.  Not a bad thing for an appliance that you want to keep running for presumably several years, if not more, especially with ZFS and logs/netflow enabled.  Depending on trends, replacement SSDs may be more expensive or harder to come by soon.  Already happening in the GPU and RAM consumer markets.