Hiya, looking the a firewall for my homelab, mostly to experiment but also for a added layer of security. There are just two of us in this household with a few laptops, phones and my servers, so nothing much. Therefore looking for something affordable and not “overkill”.
Anyone got any recommendations for this? Also how do you run your opensense/pfsense instance?
Appreciate any tips!


I had pfSense running on an old Core 2 Duo machine from around 2010 when I worked in MSP. You can run it on just about anything.
The only trouble I had was when I switched to gigabit+ service and had snort running. Snort is single-threaded and that CPU just could not keep up. Suricata would be a better choice given it’s natively multi-threaded, but the real limitation there was my setup and not pfSense.
+1 for Suricata/inline