Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyc | Hacker News Reader

One of my favorite pieces of equipment in my home lab has to be an APU2 running OpenBSD as a router. It's cheap, feels solid, and pf lets me configure complex network routing rules with quite a nice interface. Hasn't choked yet. IPsec built into the OS!

https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

View on HN

I've been running OpenBSD on an APU2 as a router for over a year (and on the ALIX it replaced many more years).

OpenBSD makes it so dead simple to setup the basics that (unlike with my NAS) I've never been tempted to try a GUI distribution such as pfSense, yet it also gives you the flexibility to do more esoteric things like forwarding DNS using DNSCrypt, or allowing UPnP, but only to the PlayStation on a VLAN that can't talk to your main network. And the PC Engines gear works perfectly with OpenBSD.

My OpenBSD router (a VM running on ESXi) is probably the most satisfying piece of modern technology I have. A joy to configure, update (every 6 months), and does exactly what I need it to with zero problems.

Can that APU2 do filtering at full wire speed on those 1Gb NICs? In my experience, many of the smaller SBPC routers can't keep up. I'm running a Netgate 4860 at home and it keeps up with my gigabit fiber connection but several of my previous attempts would not (Soekris, etc.).

I also have gigabit, and in my research it seems that the APU2 tops out around 600mbit. Newer hardware like the Celeron 3855U should handle gigabit fine though.

I did the same and have the exact sentiments about the APU2+OpenBSD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com