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Running a OPNsense firewall in a VM?

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poVoq@slrpnk.net
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selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I am not overly happy with my current firewall setup and looking into alternatives.

I previously was somewhat OK with OPNsense running on a small APU4, but I would like to upgrade from that and OPNsense feels like it is holding me back with it’s convoluted web-ui and (for me at least) FreeBSD strangeness.

I tried setting up IPfire, but I can’t get it to work reliably on hardware that runs OPNsense fine.

I thought about doing something custom but I don’t really trust myself sufficiently to get the firewall stuff right on first try. Also for things like DHCP and port forwarding a nice easy web GUI is convenient.

So one idea came up to run a normal Linux distro on the firewall hardware and set up OPNsense in a VM on it. That way I guess I could keep a barebones OPNsense around for convenience, but be more flexible on how to use the hardware otherwise.

Am I assuming correctly that if I bind the VM to hardware network interfaces for WAN and LAN respectively it should behave and be similarly secure to a bare metal firewall?

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wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works
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Another option is to pass through the PCIe devices to the VM.

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poVoq@slrpnk.netOP
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I just saw that option. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of this?

I guess when I pass the actual NIC device the hardware acceleration should work?

Edit: Looks like my host system does not support this, at least that is the error I get when trying ;)

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wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works
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For one you offload the entire processing and driver handling to the VM, so if the OS wants to do something funky, it can.

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