What do you run; Opnsense, pfsense, Smoothwall, maybe a WAF like wazuh?
Today was update/audit firewall day. I’m running a standalone instance of pFsense on a Protectli Vault FW4B - 4 Port - Intel Quad Core - 8GB RAM - 120GB mSATA SSD with unbound, pfBlockerNG, Suricata, ntopng, and heavily filtered. I did bump the swap to 8 GB as I’ve previously noticed a few ‘out of swap’ errors under load.
Before I signed off, I ran it through a couple porn sites to see if my adblocking strategy was working. Not one intrusive ad. Sweet!
Show me what you got.
Nothing fancy, old ubiquiti gateway with a dedicated pihole server for my DNS.
Same. What’s the deal with having elaborate firewall stuff for a normal family home anyway?
If the built in stuff isn’t good enough then 99.9% of households would be compromised a long time ago already.
The last stats I remember reading cited some 1.5 million home networks are compromised on a daily basis. Some people, such as myself, run more complex services on their local servers that are perhaps tied into remotes such as VPS. You’ll see a lot of selfhosters with rather elaborate firewall defenses set up. I self host a lot of services I use that the ‘normal family home’ would outsource to public entities. I have a rack in the closet and several VPS, so I need something more than just Windows Firewall, or similar, that I can dial in to my unique environment.
Also, because I can.
Valid! I also tinker with selfhosting using Docker containers, didn’t think of firewalls the same way. Thank you.
No worries mate. What do you host?
Nothing spectacular.
Git, Paperless, UniFi Controller, Pihole, Mattermost chat, Immich, Home Assistant, Frigate, Syncthing, Hoarder. Just stuff for myself, my home, and my friends. And 🏴☠️
And you?
The usual. Might be a few I’ve missed:
Some of it is for fun and testing, learning. Which I used to do. I used to have an old watchdog that I put pfsense on, just don’t need it nowadays.
Once i learn how it works and have run through the setup, I move on. Just need to spend my time in other areas, but now I have an understanding of it and can apply that logic or idea to other things and troubleshooting.
This is perfectly valid! I to a lot of tinkering with selfhosting using Docker containers, and I have learned a ton from that. I feel a bit silly that I didn’t make the connection with firewalls - just tinkering for fun!