So I recently got the chance to try out some brand new hardware from Decisio! For those of you that have never heard of them they are the official hardware manufacturer for Opnsense. They do have a premium over other third party hardware that you can find over at Amazon. But I have found that you can really see the quality over those other devices. The one I have used is the DEC750. I HIGHLY recommend this device when using Opnsense. It’s body is a metal heatshield that wraps around the whole device so that there are no need for fans. It has two 10 Gig SFP+ Ports and three 1 Gig RJ45 ports. The ports can be rearranged within the software however you want they are not tied into what they can do either! You can make the ports whatever you want to your liking. In theory you can have 4 failover WANS if you really wanted even though I don’t really recommend it but the point I am trying to make is that they can be used for virtually anything.
Now I will give my honest review about Opnsense software. It is an open source, very similar almost like fork of PFSense. The only real big difference between PFSense and Opnsense I see is that the web UI laid out differently and has a different feel. Other than that they are both VERY powerful firewall software that has nearly infinite possibilities. The amount of control between inbound, outbound, natting, IPS/IDS, rulesets and other types of routing magic, is amazing !!! The full control over everything and anything makes it great for any complicated setups. There are some things I wished were easier to understand, bit for the most part I understand what the options are. There is a learning curve but with enough time and understanding it will become easier with knowing how to setup the routes. I wanted to try Opnsense because I did not like the web UI for PFSense . I would highly recommend anyone that doesn’t like the PFSense UI to try Opnsense software.