Bare metal OPNsense on Minisforum MS-A1 NICs, not MS-01

[vincente]

Greetings,

Has anyone been successful at a bare metal OPNsense installation on a Minisforum MS-A1, having it recognize the dual built-in 2.5 Gig Realtek NICs?

Note, this is NOT the MS-01 Intel based unit.   The MS-A1 is an AMD AM5 chipset.

OPNsense installs fine and works with various USB NICs, and it even recognizes the WiFi NIC; however, it does not see the built-in NICs.

Thanks in advance!

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Have you tried installing the os-realtek-re plugin?

[vincente]

# pkg install os-realtek-re

and a reboot and long hold of the reset switch did the trick.   Posting this reply via new MS-A1 OPNsense router with 2.5 Gig Realtek NICs.  The upload of my old OPNsense config went smoothly.  Tested for 2 days before posting.

I will probably try out an MS-A2 when it is released in April timeframe.

BIG THANKS Patrick!

-Vincente

[fakebizprez]

OPNsense installs fine and works with various USB NICs, and it even recognizes the WiFi NIC; however, it does not see the built-in NICs.

Am I reading this right, I thought FreeBSD doesn't support WiFi?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Am I reading this right, I thought FreeBSD doesn't support WiFi?

It does and there is considerable effort put into improving WiFi client support for users of modern laptops. It's infrastructure mode that is severely lacking current features and protocols if working at all.

That's why using OPNsense as an AP is discouraged at the moment.

[Greg_E]

That's seems like a lot of power for OPNsense, not sure I would use an MS-A2 for this function unless I had a lot of clients and a lot of filtering setup. Maybe if I had a lot of VPN users I would want that much CPU, but that's a powerful computer for what most of us are doing.

[fakebizprez]

That's seems like a lot of power for OPNsense, not sure I would use an MS-A2 for this function unless I had a lot of clients and a lot of filtering setup. Maybe if I had a lot of VPN users I would want that much CPU, but that's a powerful computer for what most of us are doing.

👀

[Greg_E]

That's seems like a lot of power for OPNsense, not sure I would use an MS-A2 for this function unless I had a lot of clients and a lot of filtering setup. Maybe if I had a lot of VPN users I would want that much CPU, but that's a powerful computer for what most of us are doing.

👀

And how much power does that consume? My little Xeon (similar to an older i3) shows mostly the same CPU use, but I only have 16GB of ram. It's TDP is much lower as well.

The HP T740 showed very similar results when I was using it, and that would be at around 40 watts during use.

But again, depends on how many things you are trying to do with a firewall, if you have a lot of VPN, that extra power would certainly be justified over an n150.

[fakebizprez]

That's seems like a lot of power for OPNsense, not sure I would use an MS-A2 for this function unless I had a lot of clients and a lot of filtering setup. Maybe if I had a lot of VPN users I would want that much CPU, but that's a powerful computer for what most of us are doing.

👀

And how much power does that consume? My little Xeon (similar to an older i3) shows mostly the same CPU use, but I only have 16GB of ram. It's TDP is much lower as well.

The HP T740 showed very similar results when I was using it, and that would be at around 40 watts during use.

But again, depends on how many things you are trying to do with a firewall, if you have a lot of VPN, that extra power would certainly be justified over an n150.

haha, in my defense, my entire organization connects to that machine for our Wireguard VPN server. It's also running as a Tailscale exit node for me personally, as well as Unbound/DHCP,IPS,Reverse Proxy, Prometheus, several static IPs, and ZenArmor until I had to give it up because the the platform is single-threaded, and was crushing the LAN's bandwidth.

With that said, I have placed an order for two Minisforum MS-01 Work Station Refurbished (Core-i5-12600mh). Maybe it's good to be true, but the specs on these are unreal, then after you factor in the cost, it's very hard to pass up.

Given all the value I get from OPNsense, I don't mind running it on the PowerEdge R730, but having to run a second machine for H.A./CARP, makes me cry a little bit.

I still can't over how much machine you can get for $448 (i9 12th gen). You don't even miss out on U.2 capability, I guess the only major drawback is no ECC?

Thank you to whoever posted this, lol