I’m a pretty novice person considering installing opnsense for my personal home use.
Their documentation has what would seem to be incomplete hardware requirement.
For example it does not list any network hardware. I assume you need at least 1 Ethernet connection. I recall reading somewhere that you might need 2 network cards? One for in and one for out?
What about network card specs? I have old computers lying around that exceed the CPU/RAM/SSD requirements but cards are practically antiques. Should I upgrade? If so, to what?
ETA: The best internet I could subscribe to where I’m at is 1024 Mbps down, 50 Mbps up. So don’t worry about wasting fibre speeds. :(
Does anyone know about a more thorough description of requirements?
Not much. You can run it with one network card, but you’ll have to run it in trunk mode. That will also limit you to 500 mbps on a gigabit network.
I’ve run with on an old dual-core cpu with 4GB of memory, and it was still able to pump out gigabit speeds.
The best internet I could subscribe to where I’m at is 1024 Mbps down, 50 Mbps up. I’ll add that to the post I guess it is relevant since so many people have fibre. (sigh)
That is actually dependent on what you are doing. With gigabit ethernet being full duplex, you can transfer 1Gb/s both up and down at the same time.
This would mean that if he has a single port, if he was downloading a file from the internet, he could still reach 1Gb/s. If he, however, had 1Gb up and down, he could only download at 500Mb/s and upload at 500Mb/s simultaneously.
His upload being so much lower than his download would lead to him not likely noticing any difference.