

The Management network connects native management interfaces like WiFi access points and IPMI interfaces. We segregate the local network into several areas with different requirements.

Your feedback is always welcome and very much appreciated. I hope this guide is as helpful and inspiring to you as the pfSense guide was to me. Please, verify the steps yourself and do your research. I’m a homelab hobbyist, so be warned that this guide likely contains errors. I consider the OPNsense defaults stable enough for this approach in the hope of keeping the effort required to maintain this guide to a minimum. I intentionally omit most of the repetitive “click save and apply” instructions and only list configuration changes deviating from defaults, making exceptions for important settings. It’s a matter of personal taste, but I find the instructions in that guide too verbose. But I tried to strike a different balance regarding the brevity of the instructions compared to the pfSense guide. My goal was to create a comprehensive guide that’s easy to follow. As my notes grew, I decided to publish them as a guide on my website.

Some options moved to different menus or changed. To configure OPNsense, I followed the instructions of the pfSense guide, taking notes on the differences. The only thing I regret about the purchase is that I now can’t afford the sexier-looking successor model, the DEC690.

Albeit expensive and possibly overkill for my needs, I’m happy to support the open-source mission of Deciso, the maintainers of OPNsense. I bit the bullet and bought the Deciso DEC630 appliance. After researching for weeks, I decided to use OPNsense instead of pfSense. I found that guide two years ago and immediately fell in love with the network setup. The title of this guide is an homage to the pfSense baseline guide with VPN, Guest, and VLAN support that some of you guys might know, and this is an OPNsense migration of it. This beginner-friendly, step-by-step guide walks you through the initial configuration of your OPNsense firewall.
