A Raspberry Pi Based Firewall Using IPFire!

A lot of people look around for a solution to run dedicated firewalls like PfSense on a Raspberry Pi (not everyone is running a professional services and servers at home, right?) and sadly the answer is no, you won't be able to run PfSense on a Raspberry Pi. Fear not though, IPFire for the rescue! It's free and it'll provide with most of the features you'll need for a home network and most importantly, it can run on a Raspberry Pi!
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[@joeblissett3862]

Great video, thanks, waiting for the next one 😀

[@TheTinkerDad]

Thanks, glad you liked it! I'm already working on the next part! :)

[@Tofflus]

Great video, this setup could maybe be very useful for those that are traveling much. hotel room internet - IPFire with VPN home/company/provider - laptop

[@pixperfect241]

Hi there, thanks for the video. very good. can i ask you, what recommended FW rules will you run, in order to BLOCK all incoming hacks (malware, phishing...etc) from touching your GREEN zone. thank you

[@JohnDoe-ee6ef]

Would be great to see, wether snort may be configured. But i guess, the potential of the pi is not meeting the requirement needed to run snort in ips mode. Would be great if you could check anyways. Thanks for the effort so far!

[@JohnDoe-ee6ef]

Hmm, was hoping to see the next video in a week, as mentioned. Do you already know when this might air?

[@TheTinkerDad]

Hi, Yes, sorry, I'm totally behind schedule - with the lockdown thing we have due to covid kids are at home 24/7 and now I'm basically restricted to record videos at night. Everything slowed down. Anyway, it's tomorrow! Also, thanks for your patience! Regarding snort - I have another installation of IPFire running on a 2core AMD system, so I'll play around with it on that system and if that works out fine, I'll try to do the same steps on the Pi.

[@JohnDoe-ee6ef]

@@TheTinkerDad Never mind, i'll see for myself. Take care and stay healthy!

[@thegoncaloalves]

Have you tried openwrt in this setup ( rpi + usb nic)? Curious about which one would be faster (ipfire or openwrt). By the way, both will be faster than pfsense and opnsense. That is because the network stack in freebsd is slower than in linux. Something that should be improved in freebsd v13. Good video.

[@TheTinkerDad]

Haven't tried Openwrt on an RPi yet to be honest, I wonder how it would work out in practice. Right now I'm totally in love with IpFire's flexibility and extensibility!

[@benjaminallread4656]

Thank you so much!

[@TheTinkerDad]

You're welcome!

[@petrslansky6659]

What about combination of RPI and a smart switch, like Netgear GS105Ev2? The smart switch that supports VLANs can replace "USB Ethernet adapter", it will allow you to have RED, GREEN, BLUE, ORANGE networks... I am just not sure how well are VLANs supported in IPfire.

[@martinbirrell57]

I love your keyboard

[@TheTinkerDad]

Thanks! It's a Cooler Master CK550 with the "brown" switches, if you're interested.

[@JeffZiegler76]

Can you use a single NIC w/VLANS like pfSense supports?

[@jackfisher9833]

I tried booting that in my Raspberry pi Zero 2w and it refuses to boot on that little thingy.

[@qCJLbggG4IWAY9nTH6o]

what's your Pihole setup? Would I be able to run Pihole + unbound on the IPFire distro? I only have one raspberry pi :/

[@TheTinkerDad]

The IPFire distro is sadly pretty closed down - it has its own package manager, because the goal is to only be able to install 3rdparty stuff the IPFire authors have already tested. As far as I know, you cannot install PiHole on IPFire... or at least not without some low level OS hacking.