It possible to use ipfire with 1 nic on a virtual machine

Hardware
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My Ipfire pc died on me. I have a WIndows 2008 Server (Domain Controller). Can I add a NIC (USB dongle) and on a separate hard drive create a virtual machine HYPER V, install ipfire on the virtual hard drive and use the usb dongle and attach that to a managed switch that connects to my cable modem (that cannects to my isp
And then route traffic from other machines through ipfire on the virtual machine
Hope this all makes sense

2

Are you planning to use it as a firewall or just to experiment?

It is possible to install ipf as a hyper-v vm but I think it will be very buggy.

Especially if you use a USB ethernet dongle, the throughput will be limited.

But let us know, how everything worked.

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Sorry, but that’s a terrible idea. Windows Server 2008 is EOL and will no longer receive any updates. Before you worry about Ipfire, you should upgrade your Windows as soon as possible.

And apart from that, it’s generally not a good idea to use a virtual machine within the operating system for productive use. Use ESXI, Proxmox etc. directly and install the virtual machines on them. Running everything via 1 physical NIC is possible, but limits the entire machine.

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4

Hi,

I very much agree to the previous post. Further, the point of running IPFire with at least two NICs is so that it is physically not possible to bypass the firewall, ensuring that network traffic to the internet (or whatever untrusted network is connected to the RED interface) is always seen/processed/filtered by IPFire. :slight_smile:

For additional thoughts on this topic, please see www.ipfire.org - Information security recommendations for IPFire users, especially the “Supply network access on a need-to-work basis” section, as well as www.ipfire.org - Firewall configuration recommendations for IPFire users.

Thanks, and best regards,
Peter MĂźller

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its a bad idea to run a domain controller + any firewall router system on the same server

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I have had ipfire running for many years here as a VM on KVM/libVirt on my only ‘server’-machine which also runs VM’s for a mailserver, nextcloud, fileserver, database server, ldap directory, home assistant and zabbix monitoring. One physical NIC was assigned directly to the VM as RED and connected to the internet. Green was a virtual NIC connected to the internal network.
This has worked for many years (I actually was running pfsense the same way before I switched to IPFire)
I once even experimented with a transactional microOS Linux distro that only ran docker images. In one such container image I had installed libVirt and hosted an IPFire VM inside the container. This also worked, again with a dedicated physical NIC assigned to it for RED.

In the end I went for an IPFire mini appliance because I had a few issues due to the fact that the host machine during boot, has no router/dhcp/dns/etc…, until it had launched the IPFire VM which in turn then has to finish booting. And I had to make sure the other VM’s only started after the IPFire VM, but there are no builtin mechanisms, at least not then, to make sure one VM has finished booting before others are started. And secondly, whenever I wanted to tinker on my server I would have to put my household without internet.; and figured that it was time for a dedicated ipfire appliance.

I don’t know about Hyper-V, but I assume it should also be able to do a similar job. I would not recommend it as a long-term solution, certainly not considering the version of Windows you talk about, but as a temporary solution or fallback plan until you have new hw for a dedicated IPFire, why not ?

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