Experimenting with network topology and throughput.

[agent_kith]

How has your overall experience with pfSense been? I've looking into Opnsense as well - think I'm leaning towards that over pfSense.

OPNsense is a fork of pfSense i believe. And from what I gather, is the less dodgy version (i.e. more open source). I havn't tried OPNsense myself, so can only speak for pfSense. With the latter, I have been using it for a long time. And it was good, it just works, and it works well. Routing speed is good, as I only have suricata working on the WAN side.

My only complaints is somethings things break, and when it breaks, restoring configuration doesn't quite work. You have to factory reset, and then restart from the beginning.

If you are interested in IPv6 (esp IPv6-PD), as far as I can tell they have the full stack working throughout. To this day not many can claim that. The current FW I'm using (Meraki and Untangle) don't support the correct IPv6 implementation, or at all.

Alternatively, there are a heap of wireless routers on AliExpress that support OpenWRT that look half decent.

For the most part, the switch is more important. You have to make sure this switches at wire speed, i.e. with Jumbo frames set to 9000, you need to be able to pass through around 987 Mbps or better. I've only tried four ports (not all of them). Routing wise is unnecessary in this context. Having said that, I have tried those tiny Mikrotik routers, while not fast, they look pretty feature rich. Give them a shot and let me know how it goes.