Low-cost Nas firewall solution
Low-cost Nas firewall solution
Hello, I created a NAS using Free NAS and need guidance on setting up a firewall. On Google I wasn't able to locate useful resources. Anyone have suggestions on how to configure the firewall or where to find more details?
But setting up strong firewalls online is tricky, especially with free options. I tried configuring a pFsense Virtual Firewall on unRAID and ran into many challenges. There’s limited guidance available, and I faced several obstacles that required trial and error. The main issue is that most free HyperVisors, such as Free NAS and UnRAID, have weak virtual networking built in. Firewalls like OpenSense and pFsense run on BSD systems with very restricted network card drivers—almost none. You’d likely need dedicated network interfaces for the firewall, and trying to route everything through one physical NIC is technically feasible but not practical due to VLAN complexities. USB NICs didn’t work at all. Only dedicated or PCI-E based cards succeeded, preferably multi-port Intel models for better performance. The Intel card worked reasonably well with only minor speed limitations. If you must virtualize the NIC (as I did on unRAID), you’ll need the VMxnet3 driver and avoid using VirtIO. Firewalls running as VMs have their own limitations—if the VM isn’t active, the host might restart or shut down, losing network access needed to reach the VM.