I have been looking at replacing my L3 switch at the gateway of my network & the OPNsense DEC850 seems to have all the features I want, mainly, vlans, 10 GB wan, multiple 2.5 GB lan, & open firmware. Does anyone have experience with this router/ are there better routers out there that do similar setups? I have experience with Cisco hardware and am willing to learn new syntax so I am not too worried about the CLI, but I heard that opnsense’s docs are a bit thin.
You must log in or register to comment.
Ive been running OPNsense on office PCs for quite some time now and have been very happy with it. There’s quite a few changes at the moment while they’re modernizing the code base, but the migration assistants worked well, the wiki was up to date in my experience tho. The wiki is improving at least :3
But please don’t use OPNsense as a switch.
But please don’t use OPNsense as a switch.
Could you elaborate, why is it bad as a switch?
You can sometimes get away with software switching, like when almost all of your traffic goes to WAN anyways.
Software switching doesn’t scale well with smaller packet sizes and sometimes has problems maintaining line rate speeds. In my experience network shares like SMB and broadcast traffic like mDNS (like for printers) are the first to cause problems.
Most of the time risking it / not knowing if a problem is caused by software switching is not worth the money saved.
Using a dedicated switch with lots of LAN to LAN traffic also means the CPU of the router isn’t busy software switching and can focus on routing / firewalling WAN traffic reaching higher speeds and less latency.
Shouldn’t this be a non issue for the gateway. For more context on my setup, I have a jellyfin & navidrome server which are all lan. I have a wireguard exit node, a WiFi ap, Plex server, & normal residential traffic which would be querying wan quite often. Would you still expect to see the drawbacks of software switching? If so, what would you reccomend for the router?
I use opnsense but self host hardware. I love it and think it’s a great fw. I agree documentation can be thin, but usually the pfsense documents will get you 80% of the way to your goal
