Setup & Installation

Hardware Requirements

At the minimum, your host machine for OPNsense should have the following:

Additionally, your host machine needs at least 2 RJ45 ports, 1 for your WAN connection and 1 for your LAN connection. My OptiPlex only had 1 RJ45 port, so I purchased an Intel I350-T4 NIC and installed it onto the motherboard, which gave me 4 RJ45 gigabit ports. More information about that can be found here.

Installation

Installing OPNsense onto hardware is quite easy and straight forward. Download the ISO from their official website opnsense.org and create a bootable drive. You can use Rufus, balenaEtcher, or any other software to burn the ISO onto the drive. I used Ventoy, as it allows you to store several ISOs on a single drive, which makes it much easier instead of having to go through that process again for every operating system. 

Connect your modem to an RJ45 port of the host machine, and then connect either your router or laptop to another RJ45 port of the machine. A couple things to make sure you do...

With everything set up. boot your machine and select the boot drive which has your OPNsense ISO on it. 

OPNsense will run through initial configurations. To install the operating system log in with the following credentials:

Username: installer

Password: opnsense

If installed correctly, the Web GUI should be available at the designated IP that will show in the terminal console. For my machine, the Web GUI is available at the 192.168.1.1

Check out the "Configurations" Chapter to view the dashboard and available configurations!