The pfsense devs has acted like jackasses towards the opnsense gang.
And toward their users. Ask the wrong question on the pfSense subreddit or forum and expect to get lit up. The Opnsense community is much more helpful and inviting in my experience.
Pretty killer specs on paper. In my experience, these AliExpress boards have a bunch of minor annoyances that add up. Examples of those annoyances from my experience include:
Is the 80-character width of early terminals related to the 80-byte capacity of punch cards?
I definitely don’t need the SATA ports. I have a vision of putting this board in a 1u chassis. I’m sure AliExpress also has a 1u version of this hardware…
It’s not stable, sometimes doesn’t wake up from sleep, sometimes it hangs.
That’s too bad. On paper, these boards seem to check all the boxes. It seems like the reality is that they lack quality-of-life features like general reliability. Probably not a great quality in router hardware…
Good tip. I’ve definitely looked at the Fujitsu boxes. However, I’m located in the US, and Fujitsu never sold those in the States, so they’re hard to find. The shipping fees from the EU seem to be in the $50-$90 range, which eliminates any cost savings.
I’m self hosting wefwef, an Apollo-like, platform-agnostic Lemmy client.
I run Opnsense on a Proxmox VM (I followed this guide). I’m quite pleased with it. Opnsense is probably going to be more secure than any consumer router firmware, but you’re going to have to make a bigger upfront investment in hardware. I had never used Opnsense prior to using this system, and the fact that I’m running it on Proxmox is a huge benefit. If I’m ever about to do anything I’m unsure of, I can snapshot the VM in Proxmox. If my router config breaks as a result of my tinkering, I can easily restore from the snapshot.