pfSense on Raspberry Pi 3+/4

bole5

Hello,

I know that this question pops up on this forum regularly (actually since 2012) and usually gets responded with comments about it being a bad idea etc but let me put my "spin" on it.

The fact is that Raspberry Pi is inexpensive hardware that a lot of people have. Yes I know that the hardware spec is not a good fit for a security appliance (under powered, USB-based Ethernet, lack of AES-NI etc.) On the other hand, FreeBSD now provides 12.2 and 13.0 images for this platform (https://www.freebsd.orgwhere/) so the "bar" for running pfSense is really not that high anymore.

I personally tested that other firewall starting with O... on Raspberry Pi 3+ and must say I am positively surprised by the network/routing performance. In my setup I run LAN from builtin Ethernet port and WAN on an inexpensive USB dongle. I tried two dongles and both worked flawlessly. Some people also reported that in FreeBSD 13.0 support for RPi4 is good and even WiFi works well OOTB. From my testing experience, RPi could be suitable as a home appliance for most people.

Why would anyone want this?
Having a RPi pfSense image would enable people to:

Quickly test if pfSense is working for them. I am running it in Proxmox, but this is not the same as running it on a dedicated hardware
Use it as a backup should their main pfSense hardware fail. I don't want to know what would happen if (or better said when) this happens to me :(

In any scenario, Netgate would benefit the most, since many more users could get attracted to their platform.

And before someone suggests SG-1100, I live in Europe and there are no good resellers selling this appliance for a decent price and 189 USD + shipping + customs fees is much greater than 50 USD for which I can get RPi and USB Ethernet dongle.

SteveITS

@bole5 The Pis are all ARM I believe? Netgate has developed ARM only on its hardware, so the open source side would need to maintain the code. I suspect most people just pick up some 5+ year old PC and put another NIC in it, if they want alt hardware. Re: dongle, FreeBSD would need drivers for it.