My goals for this firewall were mostly to provide better robot blocking and perhaps some more powerful DDoS protection than my Raspberry Pi 3 web server is capable of delivering. I still have to do some testing before I will know if my new firewall actually provides either of those, but at least I now have the additional ability to run multiple physical web servers on my LAN. Exploring that should be fun, and fun is a very important component of running a home web server.
Not my article. Just sharing.
Why not just use a network level firewall like pfsense?
Opnsense > pfsense
The fact that I have to go through a fucking purchase page, even though pfsense is free (for now), is sketch as hell. First step in their inevitable enshittification.
Opnsense is funded by European non-profits, and is has a better UI
Not to mention they tried running a disinformation campaign against OPNsense for a few years, which was resolved in court.
Also they implemented a WireGuard module that after a review upstream on FreeBSD was found to be completely hocus.