I’m a network engineer for a living, which has led me to working with lots of powerful hardware through the years. Cisco, Juniper, HP, Huawei, and Ericsson to name a few. However, my ASUS home routers have always felt a bit… lacking. And yeah, I understand that you can’t really compare a consumer pretty-much-plug-and-pray router with a fridge-sized powerhouse like a Juniper MX960, meant for large enterprises and ISPs. But the geek in me wanted something bigger to play with. I’ve tried custom firmware like Merlin and DD-WRT, but with no real satisfaction.
After a bit of searching I came across Pfsense and OPNsense – the main contenders to being the number one open source routing operating system. My lot fell on Pfsense, which – and to each their own of course – felt like the stronger one for me. While you can install Pfsense on pretty much any modern hardware, I couldn’t find a decent NUC with two or more ethernet ports. So I decided to go ahead and buy the dedicated hardware from Netgate, the developer of Pfsense, and spend a bit of cash on their newly released Netgate 6100.
And a few days ago I received a little package from Netgate’s local supplier here in Sweden. Can’t wait to see what it can do!