I'm doing opnsense on a protectli

OPNsense on any small scale dual LAN box, either a used mini PC or a purpose made one.

pfsense running on whatever hardware that doesn’t use too much power

I bought a refurbished SFF PC and put a PCIe NIC in it. Installed opnSense.

Cheap as chips. Supremely powerful.

Dlwrx36 flashed to openwrt should serve you nicely on gigabit ethernet

I bought this Protectli Vault FW2B , and installed OPNSense strictly for firewall since I don't control the router in my town home.

I used this guide to set up a transparent bridge so I can filter out traffic before it gets to the subnet my property manager assigned to me.

Setting it up was a great learning experience. One thing that was odd for me though, was that I had to change the label of the interfaces in the ui to match the label on the hardware.

If you're considering building your own firewall, you've started down a long path of homelabbing. I'd encourage you to start with a proper setup and allow yourself plenty of room to grow. You want your setup to be extensible, and the firewall is just the beginning.

I'd grab at least a 15U rack and a Dell poweredge R210. Throw in a gigabit nic and install OPNsense. You'll have room for your switches, NAS, UPS, etc... later.

I don't know what kind of specs you're looking for for your system, but I've been very happy with my netgate.

Though it's still close to $200 for the lowest model, but comes with support if your not really sure what your doing.

Netgate 1100 $189

No link posted because I didn't look at the rules for this community.

Pfsense. I'm a purist.

Any pc with two network ports and Ipfire will do. Easy to set up and configure.

We probably need more details as to what exactly you're attempting to accomplish and how you're attempting to accomplish it.

The main issue is that each rule you add to a firewall has a performance penalty: each packet is checked against each rule before it's passed.

Ten rules require 10x more cpu than 1 rule, 100 rules need 10x more than 10 rules, and so on.

Depending on how much traffic and how many rules we're talking about and what kind of expectation you have for performance as well as anything else (eg. vpn endpoint), "small and cheap" may not be fast enough, and you might have to lean into higher performance hardware.

@alvaro @selfhosted @selfhost
For a homelab I'd look into OpenBSD's PF

What are you wanting?

Look up some mini n100 boxes. More than enough to do what you need. I think Minisforum is selling refurb units now.

I can recommend the nanopi r4s, supported by openwrt, ipfire and I think opnsense. Ive been using it as my main router for almost a year now on a symmetric 1Gb connection. Best part is it's super cheap and tiny

I just have a small Sophos Firewall at home, it does the job very well, but its a little expensive compared to free versions.

I get it for free because i do business with them.