About OPNsenseLab

OPNsense guides, configs, and hardware for serious homelabs.

OPNsenseLab covers OPNsense for homelab and small-office networks: first installation and initial setup, firewall rules, destination NAT and port forwarding, VLAN segmentation, DNS blocklisting with Unbound, Suricata IDS/IPS, Zenarmor application filtering, HAProxy with Let's Encrypt, WireGuard remote access, multi-WAN failover with gateway groups, high availability with CARP, and hardware selection from purpose-built Protectli and Deciso appliances to generic mini PCs.

It is aimed at people running OPNsense as their actual gateway, where a mistake takes the house offline. The configuration guides state the GUI path, the field values, and the way to verify the change actually took effect, because a firewall setting that looks right in the UI and does nothing in the packet path is the failure mode that costs the most time. Everything follows the OPNsense documentation, FreeBSD and Suricata references, and published hardware specifications.

What is covered here

• Advanced
• Firewall
• Firewall Comparison
• Getting Started
• Hardware
• Networking
• Security
• VPN

18 articles are published so far. New articles are announced on the RSS feed; there is no fixed publishing schedule and this site does not promise one.

How these articles are produced

Articles are researched from primary sources: vendor and project documentation, published standards and specifications, release notes, advisories, and measurements published by the people who took them. Drafts are produced with AI assistance and then edited against those same sources before anything is published. Where a figure comes from a datasheet or a third-party measurement, the article names the source and links to it so you can check the original rather than take this site's summary of it.

Everything here is published under the OPNsenseLab Editorial byline. That is an editorial desk, not a person, and no article on this site claims hands-on lab testing, benchmarking, or first-hand measurement. Nothing here should be read as a report of something this site physically tested.

Corrections

Getting it right matters more than getting it first. If something on this site is wrong, out of date, or missing the source it should cite, email hello@opnsenselab.com with the page and the specific claim. Substantive corrections are made on the page itself rather than quietly dropped.

How this site is funded

Some articles link to products on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate this site earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. Those links are the only revenue this site carries: there is no sponsored content, no paid placement, and no display advertising. Product picks are made by reading specifications and published measurements, not by testing the products.

The full position is on the disclosure page. Read it before acting on anything here that reads like a buying recommendation.

Related sites

OPNsenseLab is run alongside a small number of other single-topic sites:

• FirewallCompare - Compare home firewalls: OPNsense, pfSense, UniFi, and the hardware that runs them.
• pfSenseLab - pfSense and pfSense Plus configuration for homelabs.
• UniFiGuide - Ubiquiti UniFi setup, configuration, and integration guides.
• SelfhostRealm - Your data, your infrastructure.

Contact

Email: hello@opnsenselab.com
Site: opnsenselab.com
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