I agree completely with Michael, and others, here.
All IPFire can do, and just like any other software out there, is set an operating hardware requirement. You don’t see Windows or Linux or OPNSense or any other actors making lists of what computers they can run on. They state what is needed for them to function. Period.
Just like IPFire they might promote, and sell, some hardware as a good or better and even recommended solution, but you can never have a list with every conceivable computer being supported or not.
Some people here have one NIC with 4 ports, like I do, others have 4 NICS with each one port, or any other combination, as an example. All we can do is adapt to requirements in our network, read what IPFire needs to function, and choose the hardware from that.
Going with fiber ports is completely optional and the you need NICS that has those ports and the rest of your hardware need to support those higher transfer speeds.
OpenWRT is not a firewall btw…it is “only” a better OS for some Routers than can work as a firewall if properly configured. Typically older routers with a bit older hardware specs that are no longer officially supported by their manufacturers or receive any FW updates.
The reasons why I usually do not hand out any recommendations is because I do not want to be blamed if things go wrong for somebody else. Very often it is necessary to understand more than just a few parameters about the environment to really tailor some good solution.
But we have created our appliance series, which certainly won’t make everyone with special requirements happy, but it is a very good solution for 99% of IPFire users. Of course there is some range as in: A small desktop appliance (like the IPFire Mini Appliance) won’t run your data center with hundreds of servers and 10 GBit/s uplinks. That should be obvious. However, they are an excellent choice if you fall into the right category each appliance was designed for.
And for those, we guarantee that IPFire is working and we guarantee that it is going to perform.
There are lots of boards out there with the same chipsets, but hardware bugs. Then you are on your own. There is lots of stuff that is cheap and they cut corners designing the hardware. The you are on your own. IPFire is an open system so you can play around and tweak, but we cannot do that for you. There is simply a jungle of hardware out there that is too large to keep an eye on. And just reading specs isn’t good enough. Our appliance are tested over years now and we still keep finding things that we can improve here or there. This isn’t possible with an infinite number of devices out there.