Strav's blog

I've been using pfSense as my firewall/router for several years now.  Overall, I've been very satisfied except for one issue.  I don't believe I ever got failover to work reliably and that is key.  I had written my own software to handle failover years back so it should have been a no brainer to get it to work properly on a dedicated firewall/router package.  For the past couple years, I actually installed an a/b network switch to manually switch between our primary and backup network as needed and utilized a second (backup) server to connect to the AT&T DSL line.  The current state came up in conversation and I decided I should make another attempt at getting it working properly.  During my research process, I stumbled upon OPNsense which is a fork of pfSense and ultimately decided to give it a try.  It turns out that 5+ years of tweaking my router / firewall / DNS / DHCP / etc... adds up to a significant amount of configuration so it took a few days to get everything set up but I finally made the switch and I believe everything (including failover) is working properly now.  Here are a bunch of links that I used to get everything set up (note: some links are for pfSense but are related/applicable).

Note: While apparently it is possible to import some configuration sections from a pfSense export file, I chose to set everything up manually to ensure it was done (theoretically) properly and not take any chances on configuration incompatibility.  In some cases, I did export configs from both systems, extract data from the pfSense backup, clean it up and paste it into the OPNsense config and re-import, but this was mainly for DHCP static address mapping.

Comparison
Thinking about moving from pfSense to OPNsense

Multi-WAN / Failover
How to configure pfSense as multi wan (DUAL WAN) load balance failover router
"Skip rules when gateway is down"-equivalent in OPNSense
(Solved) Multiwan (failover) DNS not working
Default gateway behavior with DNS Resolver in 2.4.4
DNS doesnt work for wAN 2 FAILOVER
DUAL WAN ON PFSENSE 2 - HD Quality
pfSense Part 10: Configure Multi WAN Load Balancing
How to Setup Failover and Load Balancing in PFSense
Pfsense - Multiple Wan link load-balancing
Pfsense - Multiple Wan link Failover Configuration
OPNsense - Multi WAN

Installation
OPNsense Installation [ Step by Step ]

Port Forwarding
NOTE: for port forwarding, set up the port forward and OPNsense will automatically create the linked rule.
Portforwarding in OPNsense
[Tutorial] How I do port forwarding - simple and straightforward
How to Configure Firewall Rules in OPNsense

BIND
OPNsense - BIND Plugin
BIND with DNSBL – more detailed information about DNSBL types?
DNSBL via BIND Plugin

Config Backups
Automatic config backups using os-api-backup
Sample bash script for backups using the API

Miscellaneous
My Successful Migration - pfSense to OPNsense
How to setup AT&T Arris BGW210-700 IP passthrough