PfSense/OpnSense Firewall Hardware

20th August 2019

NewEgg has Protectli hardware $250ca, fanless, 4x Gig eth ports, 0 Ram, 0 HDD. USB Wifi is an option. May have a free m.2 socket onboard. https://www.newegg.ca/p/2DS-001U-00002?Description=2%20nics&cm_re=2_nics--9SIA6XD5UV1629--Product

Pfsense does sell official hardware the Netgate SG-3100 (1000 series is not recommended) $350us. 6x Gbe, 2x Arm Cpu cores, 2Gb Ram, 8Gb Ssd, pfsense pre-installed, 1x USB3

Pfsense also sells the PcEngine APU2 (branded Netgate) $378us. 3x Gbe, 2x cpu, 2Gb ram, 30Gb Ssd if you need to store logs. May have free conventional Sata, 1x M.2 and 2x PCIe sockets. Apparently a popular choice, out of stock for a while.

These boxes come pre-installed with PfSense firewall but the beauty of open source is you can run whatever fits your needs. OpnSense does not require AES-NI hardware, IpFire can run on Raspberry Pi 3 (not fast) or other ARM hardware. Untangle is Freemium; the advanced features cost $ FreeBsd is supposed to work with any board that support U-Boot, Pine Rock64 is the only SBC I know of that qualifies.

repurposed a Lanner 75xx box (was AppNeta M25) as an OpnSense firewall. has internal CF card storage which can have OpnSense nano version written to it. Boots, requests a DHCP address with OpnSense as the reported OS. Ran out of testing time, Could NOT find the interneal interface 🙁

Atomic Pi x86 SBC $35us $60ca 1x Eth

RockPi E $30 1x 1gbE, 1x 100MbE

NanoPi R2S 2x 1GbE

ExpressoBin 2x 2Gbe, 1x 100MbE

OrangePi R1 2x 100MbE

Banana Pi BPi-R2 5x 1GbE

NanoPi R4S 2x 1GbE, 1Gb/4Gb ram, 6cores, 2x USB3, NO eMMC, NO video