I am not overly happy with my current firewall setup and looking into alternatives.
I previously was somewhat OK with OPNsense running on a small APU4, but I would like to upgrade from that and OPNsense feels like it is holding me back with it’s convoluted web-ui and (for me at least) FreeBSD strangeness.
I tried setting up IPfire, but I can’t get it to work reliably on hardware that runs OPNsense fine.
I thought about doing something custom but I don’t really trust myself sufficiently to get the firewall stuff right on first try. Also for things like DHCP and port forwarding a nice easy web GUI is convenient.
So one idea came up to run a normal Linux distro on the firewall hardware and set up OPNsense in a VM on it. That way I guess I could keep a barebones OPNsense around for convenience, but be more flexible on how to use the hardware otherwise.
Am I assuming correctly that if I bind the VM to hardware network interfaces for WAN and LAN respectively it should behave and be similarly secure to a bare metal firewall?
Try VyOS. I run it on APU2 myself. No GUI no convolution.
I come from VyOS and really liked it, but still prefer opnsense for the GUI, constant updates and plugins. VyOS started losing appeal once they opted for subscription stable iso access (even if they did give me a free subscription for some comment contribution in their repo). Also, I have to admit, that VyOS needs a fraction of the resources needed by opnsense.
Open source projects need to make money somehow. I found VyOS method quite acceptable. They giving good instruction and tools to build your own stable ISO. So do not be lazy or contribute somehow. Unfortunately their paid support costs too much. I was considering trying to push VyOS to be used as virtual router at my work, but it costs more than Cisco C8000v
I keep wanting to look into that one. Can it be easily extended from the Debian repositories?
nope, it is very deeply customized debian. Need to be installed from scratch.