A tale of firewall hell

This doesn’t really have to do with Home Assistant but as it’s a closely related topic I thought I would share here.

I’ve been a pfSense user since way back to 1.1 or 1.2. Always been a good solid product. I probably have deployed it 100 times in various situations with great results. I have made personal finical contributions to the developers way back to help them move forward (everyone needs pizza and beer for hackathons).

For my home use I used a APU small embedded system running pfSense 2.x - this system is 5 or 6 years old now and works great. It’s moved from Canada, to Switzerland, to the US with us. A great little box. The APU uses a PCEngines SBC; but as it’s age would suggest it’s not a rocket in the CPU department. But it will push 350Mbps or so. I bought this system from the pfSense store long long ago and could not be happier with my purchase. It came with support which I only needed once or twice but it was very professional.

Anyhow recently I upgraded to FIOS gigabit and the APU was no match. But being so happy with my prior purchase I wandered into the pfSense store and purchased a SG3100. This system has been nothing but a nightmare. It has been replaced twice. On every pfSense upgrade it corrupts itself. And to make matters even better the image used to bring it back from corruption is “controlled” by Netgate (who makes the hardware and now owns pfSense) and you need to request it from their support guy. They also don’t test releases well; even on their own hardware platforms (I could see them not testing on open hardware) so it is often upgrade fail. This weekend was another example of this.

So Friday night I was left with a failed SG3100 again, no image to bring it back, and no answer from their support since (it’s been 2 days now).

So that little APU is back up and getting the bits onto the internet so I can post this update…

And I’ve just ordered the more current APU2 version of the same product but this time you can’t via the pfSense guys as they’ve been bought by Netgate! So a great product but controlled by a not so wonderful vendor… The future is concerning here.

So a heads up - while I happy recommend pfSense I need to qualify this now that I do net recommend Netgate. This puts the advice as odds as one owns the other; and not the right direction.

I totally agree with you @jwelter

I have 4 APU2 4GB RAM and I bought them maybe 3 or 4 years ago for pfsense.

Right now I’m testing on installing HASS.IO on one of this units. If that works fine, I’ll be posting a quick guide on how to do it.

I think it’s an excellent hardware for pfSense, so it maybe good as well for home assistant.
One thing I love of them is their low power consumption, heat tolerant (60-80 centigrade) , and the AES support for encryption to accelerate the OpenVPN tunneling.

If anybody has used an APU for HASS.IO, please let us know your thoughts about it.

Hi Gabriel,

Did you ever succeed in installing hass.io on your APU?