Home security setup - help pls!

Community
1

Dear Community,

I’m looking for a simple solution that can do firewall, IPS, DNS caching and filtering (like pi-hole or adguard home), plus NAT and DHCP. I want to know if IPFire can do all this and which devices work best with it.

My plan is to buy a device that fits between the ISP’s router and my home switch to handle these tasks.

Thanks for your help!

Viktor

2

Hi Viktor,

thank you for asking!

IPFire can do all the things you mentioned. Feel free to read more in our documentation at www.ipfire.org - Welcome to IPFire Documentation. Especially this page could be handy for you: www.ipfire.org - Firewall Documentation

The devices working best with IPFire are the ones we make ourselves. You can find them at Lightning Wire Labs - the company behind IPFire: Firewall Appliances - Lightning Wire Labs Store.

Best,
Rico

3

Hi Victor,

one thing you should think about is to ‘switch your ISP router to a media converter(modem)’ only, if possible.
This reduces problems with NAT and DNS/firewalling. My experience is, that in this configuration the administration and problem solution is much easier.

4

Welcome Viktor,

In response to your capabilities question:

Firewall -yes
IPS - yes
DNS caching and filtering - yes
NAT - yes
DHCP - yes

Another thing that you’ll find with IPFire is that if you have problems with installation, configuration or other issues, the community here is very active and helpful and responds pretty quickly to questions that you may have about using IPFire!

To me that’s a big plus for choosing to use IPFire!

Regards,
Stephen

5

IpFire can do quite everything you’re looking for (IMO the DNS filtering is a bit on the small size) however is not… Simple.

While not being that hard to use, configure, manage, the whole software expects you to “know your shill”, in networking design, configuration, rule creation.

There’s a setup procedure, there is documentation, but there are no safety nets or guardrails to avoid that you mess so much the configuration that maybe 5 minutes ago was “quite good but not enough”.

Using other words, is no consumer-ready project at all.

On the brighter side, could teach you a lot. If you not willing to learn and/or spend time, consider to pay someone that kickstart your goals in somewhat working configuration.