this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
19 points (95.2% liked)

Selfhosted

40040 readers
717 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I’m working on setting up my first homelab. I have an older dell optiplex with a duel PCIe NIC in it. I was wondering if I could setup OPNsense as a docker container or virtual machine so that I could also use the extra resources of the box for other things besides just being a router. Is this a good idea?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Yeah, this is perfectly doable. I ran a very similar setup for a while. I'd recommend passing one of the NICs directly through to the VM and using one for the host to keep it simple, but you can also virtualize the networking if you need something more complex. If you do pass through a single NIC, you'll need a switch capable of handling VLANs and a bit of knowledge on how to set up what's called a "router on a stick" with everything trunked over one connection and only separated by VLANs.

Keep in mind, while this is a great way to save resources, it also means these systems are sharing resources. If you need to reboot, you're taking everything down. If you have other users, that might be annoying for everyone involved.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have a managed switch. I’m a little confused how everything would be hooked up if I’m using a vm for pfsense and another vm for some Linux distro. I want the router and that distro to be isolated from my other vlans. Could I use the onboard nic hooked up to the switch to put the distro on its own vlan?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You can absolutely attach each VM and even the host to separate NICs which each connect back to the switch and has its own VLAN. You can also attach everything to one NIC and just use a virtual bridge(s) on the host to connect everything. Or any combination therein. You have complete freedom on how you want to do it to suit your needs. How this is done depends on what you're using on the host for a hypervisor though, so I can't give you exact directions.

One thing I should have thought of before; if two NICs are on one single PCI card, you probably can't pass them through to the VM independent of one another. So that would limit you to doing virtual networking if you want to split them.

load more comments (4 replies)