OpenBSD Router Guide (2020)

I spent some time a while back using this guide, along with some ansible to setup a home router. I ended up putting it on the back burner for a few reasons.

1) DNS reflection was an issue for some internal services I host. 2) Connecting to my Virgin Media (uk) router and handling PPPoE was confusing and I struggled with the documentation. 3) Just in general, having an internet connection is really importaint to troubleshooting problems. Having my internet down while trying to fix things was just too inconvenient for me.

In the end, I went back to PfSense. I have a bash script that backs up the config daily to s3. Was good enough to recover from a different issue recently. It's a real shame, I'd love to do this all my self but I may never pick this project back up.

I did exactly that last week with Debian 11. I got tired of IPFire (a linux distribution for routers, like pfSense). Since my only connectivity to the Internet is LTE, the most challenging part was bootstrapping the system without an Internet connection, after that it went very smoothly.

What Virgin Media modem+router are you using?

I have a Superhub 3.0. In modem-only mode there's no PPPoE, it just rather transparently acts like you have an ethernet cable running to your ISP. Just putting dhcp in my hostname.em0 works exactly as intended and my router gets assigned the public IP address.

Neat guide but I'd much rather see a guide on how to set up a cost-effective 10Gbps WAN to LAN throughput router/gateway with NAT.

Those of us building our own routers (I've done so since about 2006 when I got 1Gbps fibre installed for the first time) usually have a quite large cross-section with people on bleeding edge internet connections, and with (pro-)consumer 10Gbps internet and networking becoming more and more common a router capable of such is also more relevant. I see very little information about what's the minimal/cost effective hardware requirements capable of routing with NAT at wirespeed for these applications. Most of the content I read is either geared towards slower speeds (e.g. 1Gbps) or using overly beefy machines which are both power hungry and most likely overkill for the purpose.

Something that would be interesting to see as well is high speed NAT routing performance comparison between Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD using Intel or other well supported 10Gbps nics.

I also had some issues with PPPoE, for some reason it did not worked for me, then suddenly it started to work with the very same config. That was very weird, but it still works fine.

     shark# cat /etc/hostname.pppoe0                                                                                                                                                    
     inet 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 NONE \
     pppoedev em0 authproto chap \
     authname '' authkey '' up
     dest 0.0.0.1
     !/sbin/route delete default
     !/sbin/route add default -ifp pppoe0 0.0.0.1
     shark# cat /etc/hostname.em0 
     up
     shark#