Currently I use: on the road iPhone 13 Pro + Apple Watch Ultra 2 👂 enhancement: Left: Cochlear Nucleus 8 Right: Resound OMNIA 960 Lenovo Thinkpad T480 Full HD IPS Display Intel i7-8550U Fibocom L830-EB LTE 16GB RAM WD SN770 2TB SSD Lenovo Thinkpad Battery 61++ (72Wh) Arch Linux (encrypted ZFS root) Workstation AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 32GB G.Skill RipJaws V Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XTX NITRO+ Vapor-X 24GB Asus ROG STRIX B350-F Gaming be quiet!...
Preamble So, why build a firewall with Proxmox as a hypervisor and not install bare-metal directly? Well, i ran OPNSense bare-metal for years on a Sophos XG105. It was stable and running fine. The Sophos also had an usb serial port, which was very useful for console access. Unfortunaly, the system began to show its age and performance was not sufficient anymore. When there was a lot of network traffic on other VLANs, I had intermittent packet loss and lag spikes in video and voice calls....
For testing purpose i have an old Fritz!Box 7360 flashed with OpenWRT. For $reasons I needed to reflash the original firmware. Unfortunaly the Recovery tool didn’t work with my model, because it used to be provider branded by EWE. There is a rebranded Version of the tool by EWE, but this didn’t work either. So i researched a little and it turns out you can flash the firmware manually via the ADAM bootloader, just like OpenWRT....
Recently I moved and need to rethink my rack and network solution. Previously my server and the main switch lived in my IKEA Oppli TV-Bench, which was already showing its age. I used a Mikrotik CSS326-24G-2S+RM which is a very capable switch for the price, but unfortunaly don’t have PoE (For 120€ also a little too much asked). (At the time) my only PoE device was my Ubiquiti Unifi AP AC Pro which I powered via the included injector....