So this little thing arrived last week. Ever since I got my Unraid box up and running 24/7, I just felt I needed more control over the entire network. This is primarily because my existing home router would randomly drop packets and anyone who has planned to work from our home won’t be able to do so.
As for the specs, it’s a fanless appliance running a quad-core Intel 12th-gen J6412 (2 GHz base, 2.6 GHz boost) with 5x Intel i226 2.5Gbe NICs. I chose the bare minimum option so I can avoid the crappy RAM and storage that might come with it. For the RAM I was able to source second-hand 2x8GB Samsung DDR4 SODIMMs and for the storage I didn’t any more bother and just ordered a 240GB SSD from Amazon since these come cheap these days.
Installed Proxmox and spawned a VM running a router software based on freeBSD called OPNsense. I can’t believe I’ve been missing on this piece of software for the longest time. It feels like I’ve rekindled my love for networking ever since I switched to a different role in my career graduating from configuring routers and switches.
The entire setup process was very straightforward. I just got confused a tad bit in the beginning when I was trying to figure out which interface to assign for management access. On my first attempt, I assigned the first interface in the list, expecting that it would be mapped to the first physical port. But when I tried to plug an ethernet cable from my laptop, for some reason I couldn’t ping the management IP I set. Long story short I re-installed Proxmox again only to know that the first installation was already correct. Maybe some lose cable?
Anyway the router has been running stable for the past week. This is with virtio running as a driver for the Intel i226 NICs. On average I’m getting about 500Mbps for internet (I used to get about 700MBps with a TP-Link A10 router and yes I can deal with that 200Mbps difference for now!). I’ll explore physically passing through the NICs later on once I get the time. But as far as I can tell, I’m just loving it. On top of that Proxmox has also been remarkably gaining my interest now that I have a pi-hole running in an LXC container.