In large part due to a more modern BSD base and Wireguard support (not to mention Netgate being a company with business practices which are hard to like). More recently (5 years ago!), I switched to the fork - Opnsense. My first foray with the software was in High School combining multiple cable modems together back in the good old days of Docsis 2.0 mac cloning. Often these types of firewall softwares act as a catch all for critical network services like a DHCP server or local DNS resolver and so on. In most typical homelabber / self-hosting environments we aren't afraid to roll our own firewall using software such as Opnsense.

This post will detail how I solved a few interesting problems as I fully automated DNS overrides and DHCP reservations using Pihole, and the program it's built on top of Dnsmasq. It's been one of those minor friction points of network administration that I've put up with because automating the process seemed daunting. You do like declarative configurations don't you? Good!įor the longest time I've made do with clicking through the Opnsense UI to add static IP reservations via MAC address mapping.

Opnsense adguard home