I am planing to integrate these components in a rack metal case, but a rack miniITX case is expensive and I don’t know if will properly fit. I wanted to integrate the firewall in my home lab rack, so I’ve started to tear all the components apart until only the base components remained – motherboard, ram, cpu, hdd. Suddenly, I remembered that I am having an old laptop that was lying in a corner and I said that this would be the perfect candidate for my new future firewall/router. Though I haven’t had any idea about the hardware that I was going to use. Then I searched for a few more days and finally I decided that will be more challenging to go as cheap as possible with this project.

Then I changed my mind when thinking that the noise coming from the fans could be disturbing and the power consumption could also be a bit to high. I had the intention to buy one from Ebay, though they are also not so cheap. I wanted for some time to install pfSense in my home network, but I didn’t want to buy an expensive already made firewall device.Īfter spending a few days looking for a solution, I found at some point that Dell PowerEdge R210 II is quite used as hardware for pfSense/OPNsense. In today’s post, I would like to show you the process of transforming a single NIC old laptop into an OPNsense firewall/router.

Opnsense firewall