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fix theme, fix urls

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Don Harper 2025-06-17 22:14:34 -05:00
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---
date: "2021-03-06T04:00:00-07:00"
title: "Crash of the Firewall"
categories: ["personal","sa"]
image: "/images/Netgate-SG-1000-Next-to-SAS-SSD.webp"
featured_image: "/images/Netgate-SG-1000-Next-to-SAS-SSD.webp"
#series: [""]
summary: "Box go Boom"
Victor_Hugo: "true"
Focus_Keyword: "firewall"
---
So, back to the end of 2016, [Netgate](https://netgate.com) announced a small (think pack of playing cards size) ARM based firewall. I was in need of a new firewall, so I picked one up. This little guy runs [pfSense](https://pfSense.org) which is a [FreeBSD](https://freebsd.org) based firewall solution, and it ran very well for me with no issues for over 4 years.
Until the [Winter Storm of 2021]({{<ref "well,-that-was-fun">}}), that is. Now, I am not sure if something happened to it during the storm, or if the internal storage passed its write endurance. Either way, I knew it was not long for the world, so I started prepping for the replacement.
Since pfsens had worked well for me, I was planning on keeping it, but upgrade to some better hardware. I found a Qotom Q515G6-S05 Mini PC which has 6 Gigabit Ethernet Intel NICs powered by Intel Celeron 3865U. The extra ports meant I could easily carve out some networks for specific things like IoT things. But, it does not seem to be yet...
And then it failed this morning. Hard. No problem, I thought as I had already bought the new box, and even had loaded pfSense. What could go wrong?
pfSense would not boot once I had restored my config from the old box. Staring to get worried as I had kids trying to to do school work with no network, I grabbed an old box I had laying around with two NICS in it. This time, I could not even boot pfSense on it. I tried many different USB keys, and burning styles, but nothing work.
I ended up grabbing a Linux based firewall distro to use on the second box. So far, it is working pretty well. It has some nice features which are missing from pfSense, but one or two missing features which pfSense has. Over the next week or so, I will try to install it onto the Qotom box to see if I can get it going.

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---
date: "2021-03-21T04:00:00-07:00"
title: "Firewall Saga, pt II"
categories: ["personal", "sa"]
image: "/images/ipfire-tux.webp"
featured_image: "/images/ipfire-tux.webp"
#series: [""]
summary: "The saga continues"
Victor_Hugo: "true"
Focus_Keyword: "firewall"
meta: "The firewall saga continues"
---
When I was here [last]({{<ref "crash-of-the-firewall">}}), I was talking about how my trusty firewall appliance of many years had fallen over, and the challenges of trying to get [pfSense](https://www.pfsense.org) working on the new hardware. I figured it was time for a quick updates.
This last weekend, I did cut over to the purpose-bought box for the firewall, but I have not as of yet put to use the extra ports for WiFi and DMZ use. I still have a bit of thinking to do on how I best want to set that up.
Whilst I am not pleased to find out the IPFire team's thoughts on [wireguard](https://blog.ipfire.org/posts/why-not-wireguard), I respect their decision on their project. Given that I am currently running wireguard at home (I have not had a chance to test it outside yet due to the [plague](/tags/plague/)) I was hoping they would support it. As if the fact I could not get pfSense booting was not reason enough, the pfSense project announced that they were dropping support for wireguard for the foreseeable future.