I knew going in that I wanted more than two ethernet ports for my OpenBSD firewall device. I had visions of multiple networks and/or a spare port that I could use when I screwed up my pf configuration. I also knew that I wanted HDMI so I could pop the firewall on my KVM switch - I’d used serial to the APU2 and that was not always wonderful. The Linux box would sometimes forget about the serial ports when they were plugged in for a while.
In the end, I got a random Intel N5105 mini-PC with four Intel ethernet ports. The HUNSN Micro Firewall Appliance, Mini PC, VPN, Router PC, Intel N5105, HUNSN RJ03, AES-NI, 4 x Intel 2.5GbE I226-V LAN, Type-C, TF, M.2 WiFi 6 Slot, Barebone, NO RAM, NO Storage, NO System was around $250 US. Add a Western Digital NVMe 500G drive and 16G of Cruical laptop RAM and I had something on which I could install a system. It’s low-powered enough that I don’t mind keeping it running 24/7, and high-powered enough that I’m not worried about it being a bottleneck.
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I learned afterwards that the I226-V might potentially have a problem if you want to do 2.5G ethernet. So far, I haven’t experienced any network instability because of that.
As a belt-and-suspenders kind of thing, I bought a “silent” USB fan that sits on top of the case, just because the server room can get a little warm.
This post is part of a series on [setting up an OpenBSD 7.4 firewall device](/blog/2023-10-15 23:30:53 GMT-7-setting-up-an-openbsd-7-4-firewall-device).