OPNsense is up and running

All right, so today was the day I finally set up OPNsense for the first time.

Honestly, it was a pretty interesting experience. From starting the installation to actually having everything working, it took me about two hours. I got OPNsense installed, set up the firewall rules, put my ISP router into bridge mode, swapped everything over, and got the local network working properly.

And now it's up and running. 🎉

I did run into one small issue with the wireless router extender thing that came with my ISP. It apparently really doesn't like OPNsense. It was designed to plug directly into the ISP's little network hub, which doesn't really exist anymore now that the router is in bridge mode.

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with that yet.

I might see if there's a way to jailbreak the thing and just turn it into a basic Wi-Fi access point. If that's too much of a pain, I'll probably just buy a cheap Wi-Fi adapter or access point that I can connect directly to the OPNsense network and use that instead.

Once I get the wireless situation sorted out, the next thing on my list is getting DHCP fully configured and then tying all of this into the rest of my home automation setup.

I've already got an Ansible repository that I'm using to manage a lot of this stuff. I'm going to be adding Terraform to the mix as well. The idea is basically to have infrastructure-as-code for my home services instead of manually configuring everything.

Right now the repository handles setting up my Kubernetes cluster on the home server, and it also sets up Pi-hole for local network DNS.

If you don't know what Pi-hole is, it's basically a self-hosted DNS server with community-maintained blocklists. You point your network's DNS at it and it can block requests to advertising, telemetry and known malicious domains before they ever leave your network.

The end result is basically a network-wide ad blocker, malware-domain blocker and telemetry blocker.

Which is pretty nice when you're trying to avoid having every company on the internet harvest your sweet, sweet data.

Alongside that, I've also got Home Assistant running.

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that can integrate with things like Alexa and Google Home. Right now I'm mostly using it for temperature monitoring, but I'd like to expand that over time. Blinds are probably one of the next things I'd like to add.

And then, because apparently I don't have enough things running on this little server already, I've also got my game servers on there.

Currently I've got Project Zomboid and Palworld running in Kubernetes.

So at this point the little home lab is starting to become a real thing.

The next steps are pretty straightforward: get the wireless sorted out, get DHCP fully configured, and then start getting Terraform involved with the actual network configuration.

I'm also going to look at getting Terraform to create the incoming firewall rules for the game server pods in Kubernetes. That should be an interesting little project, especially once I'm trying to have the firewall configuration and Kubernetes configuration work together automatically.

We'll see how that goes over the next couple of days.

Later days.

https://pi-hole.net/

https://www.home-assistant.io/