HUNSN Mini PC Firewall Appliance with Intel N5105, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD - OPNsense VPN Router, 4x 2.5GbE LAN Ports, WiFi 6, AES-NI Encryption for Home & Small Business Network Security

I bought a couple of these to replace an aging Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 4. I really liked the Ubiquiti (I had owned the EdgeRouter X before that), but I was curious about OPNsense.OPNsense had a bit of a learning curve, but so did Ubiquiti. You probably already know that though if you're shopping around for a dedicated firewall box. To me, this served the purpose very well. I love that there are four 2.5Gb ports built in and that there is a barebones option to add the HDD and memory that will meet your specific needs.I debated virtualizing OPNsense on Proxmox or doing a bare metal install. In the end, I wound up going the Proxmox route and I'm glad that I did. I don't really like the thought of having something else sitting in between my firewall and the Internet, but I dampened my concerns a bit by doing PCI passthrough on the 3 NICs that I used for the firewall (2 WAN, 1 LAN trunk, and the 4th port I'm using as Proxmox management). There were a couple of big benefits for me to using Proxmox as I got up to speed with OPNsense.... I could quickly take snapshots before I made big changes, and I could set up Ubuntu VMs on the same HUNSN RJ03 box and assign them to whatever VLAN I needed to test things out with. The HUNSN box handled it great. I had two or three Ubuntu VMs going at a time as well as OPNsense and it kept up great. There was of course a little lag in the Ubuntu VMs because I was giving them 1 core and 2MB of memory, but for testing out basic "can this box see that box" scenarios, it was perfect.I have a 1Gb fiber connection and a second 500Mb one and have them set up in a load balanced manner on this box. I have logging enabled on all firewall rules (and I have a ton of them on top of a very partitioned network with way more VLANs than I will admit to publicly) and OPNsense on this HUNSUN box coasts like it isn't doing anything. Super impressed!Anyway, I liked the original HUNSN RJ03 so much that I put another one on my Amazon gift list for x-mas and happily received it (after my non-nerdy wife verified "are you sure that's what you want??" Yes. Yes it is.