OpenBSD anyone? Instead of OpnSense, OpenWRT etc?

vishalrao

vishalrao

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I was stumped when I briefly tried opnsense on a routerPC - found the UI to be not really noob user-friendly.

Thought about trying OpenBSD instead, configure everything command line.

Anyone else tried this OS for stuff like multi-WAN load-balancing, failover/failback etc?

Your experience with it?
 
vishalrao said:
Is OpenWRT only firmware based for commercial routers or can it be installed on a general purpose mini PC too with intel cpu, NIC, ssd etc?
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OpenWrt on x86 hardware (PC / VM / server)

OpenWrt on x86 hardware (PC / VM / server) See also: OpenWrt on UEFI based x86 systems OpenWrt can run in normal PC, VM, or server hardware, and take advantage of the much more powerful hardware the x86 (Intel/AMD) architecture can offer. Download disk images Go here, choose the release...
openwrt.org openwrt.org
 
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You should find openwrt a bit more user friendly and there are many youtube tutorials too.
You can install it on x86 hardware as @ibose pointed out.

I'm using it currently on a celeron mini pc basically for better management of devices, DNS adblocking and SQM QoS for reducing bufferbloat.
 
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enthusiast29 said:
Yes it does but if anyone has a spare machine at home there's no need to buy a pi.
Also to run it in a decent way anyone would need at least a pi4 anything lower than that will have bandwidth limitation.
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TBH, it comes to cost of energy bills for an old PC vs cost of new hardware. I stopped using my 12th gen pc with proxmox and flashed a Tp link router with openwrt which consumes less than 10 watts and moved rest of the stuff to cloud and a raspberry pi.
 
meehatpa said:
TBH, it comes to cost of energy bills for an old PC vs cost of new hardware. I stopped using my 12th gen pc with proxmox and flashed a Tp link router with openwrt which consumes less than 10 watts and moved rest of the stuff to cloud and a raspberry pi.
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how do you store your personal data (photos, documents etc), is it stored in the cloud? how do you make copies of it for redundancy?
do you encrypt your files before uploading them in cloud for privacy? please explain your data storage flow, I am looking to downsize my nas to something more compact.
 
bobbyprajan said:
What exactly is the issue you face with Opnsense ?

I run Opnsense in a dual WAN setup and it is not that difficult if you follow the documentation
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Yeah I had to repeatedly refer to docs for every step of the setup... IIRC I had to follow the right sequence of steps, anything "out of order" and the connections wouldn't work.

I was hoping the UI would be n00b friendly , like the TPLink ER605 UI which is not too bad.
 
Navier said:
how do you store your personal data (photos, documents etc), is it stored in the cloud? how do you make copies of it for redundancy?
do you encrypt your files before uploading them in cloud for privacy? please explain your data storage flow, I am looking to downsize my nas to something more compact.
Click to expand...
I dont store the data directly in the cloud. Cloud storage is expensive anyway. All my docker containers are hosted in the cloud but the docker volume for the storage is routed via wireguard to use nfs from my raspberry pi.
Of course it does not have any redundancy. The redundancy is taken care by using storj from the pi using periodic cron jobs with rclone.
 
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