Newb and Loving It

[Cavallo]

Just dipping my toes into OPNsense. My small company has used Fortigate products for many years. That decision was sensible when we made it. I knew a lot less, and the products were well thought of.

Here in 2020, the math is very different. The ongoing costs of a commercial firewall appliance are hard to justify to an embattled bean-counter. I studied a variety of options and wound up with OPNsense at the top of my list.

I'm a huge fan of self-experimentation, so I've begun by building myself a new router at home with an HP T730 thin client, since these seem to be dirt cheap and readily available on the used market. I've been at it a week, and I'm seriously impressed. So far, everything functions flawlessly - even ZeroTier.

The only thing I miss so far is the ability to back up the config to an inserted USB stick, and potentially recover that stored config at boot time. That was a comforting feature that Fortinet offered in the GUI. I'm sure I could cobble something together on the command line if I really needed to. But seriously - if that's all I can think of to nitpick, then things are going well indeed.

Thanks for changing my game, OPNsense.

[packet loss]

1. Format a USB drive as fat32 non-bootable and name it conf
2. On the USB drive create a folder named conf
3. Save your OPNsense configuration file as config.xml and place it in the conf folder
4. Done

During bootup, OPNsense looks for a drive containing your saved OPNsene configuration file and automatically imports it. Follow the guidelines above so OPNsense properly finds the config file during bootup.