"jwt NETGATE 3 days ago
@johnpoz said in Serious ....:
I don't recall them doing things before about April fools
we (I) did, back in 2017 https://www.netgate.com/blog/building-a-behemoth-router
I even pointed to it in today's."
When I was first looking for something to run at home I looked into them and frankly they are bad actors and should not be trusted.
I ran pfSense ages ago, well before the OPNsense fork, and I'd like to go back to one or the other for my home network but haven't had time to research the current situation. Wouldn't mind hearing from those more familiar.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...
No matter what switches I toggled or incantations I recited I would not get full line speed.
So many questions.
So DSL and maybe Fiber services. Ok, but ISPs provide or endorse some device to deal with the wire. At that point you're free to firewall your ordinary ethernet traffic with whatever you wish, no PPPoE involved, no?
The encapsulation requires a lot of CPU power, and on non specialised x86 hardware you end up needing a highly clocked CPU to get gigabit speeds.
OpenWRT is Linux based so has a multithreaded implementation.
My Flint 2 router has some sort of hardware acceleration so hammering a gigabit line shows <1% CPU, leaving lots of overhead for things like Docker.
[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_FreeBSD
[1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.html
[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/binfmt_elf....
It was a win-win to be able to explore both. OPNsense feels a little bit less reliable because they often release (once or twice a month), but also often break things (it was always possible to solve this pretty fast, or patches appeared). I do not have a preference for the interfaces - I feel like I am finding things faster in pfSense, but that may be because I simply used it longer. Both are quite good.
pfSense is slow to adapt features (e.g. Wireguard), but concentrates on the important basics. It is a solid software that never left me, it never crashed and survived where I expected otherwise.
Given that I trust OPNsense a little bit more (because the maintainers communicate their goals clearer), I am planning to slowly phase out my pfSense and first move it behind another OPNsense box, as an internal second barrier behind my public WAN net. This may change though, I am planning the migration phase to happen between 2025-2027. Right now, it feels good to have both worlds.
Despite another comment claiming this was "common" in the US, I've been on a number of ISPs in the US and never seen PPPoE used at all. Had no idea this was still going on. On fiber even!
Seems like I'd get some kind of efficient PPPoE box and put that between the ISP and whatever software router/firewall (PfSense, et al.) or "non specialized" hardware router. I suppose fragmentation could be avoided by limiting packet size a little to make room for the 8 byte PPPoE bits.